E Pluribus, Ego Unum
by La Aardvark
Summary: The third film following the Mirratord and their exploits; when the rift widens as differences cannot be resolved, it is left to one saddened member to bring them back together and heal old scars. But will it be in time, or be too late to save them all?
1. Selective Archetype

**E Pluribus, Ego Unum **

**Scene One; **_**Selective archetype **_

Fog hung in the heavy winter air like a dense blanket of concealment, hiding all forms of evil denizens from sight. Something was out there, something hunting him, and he knew well what his odds of escaping were. He had slipped through their fingers enough times to brush with their damnation, their scent of evil an overpowering sense to the end that there could be no eden if such people were allowed to persist.

But power! How could they be so routed from existence when their numbers only grew as they spread their lies, breaking pacts and shattering Covenants… creating dead and missing out of living, breathing souls loyal to all that was good and beautiful in the world… but today, on this fog-covered field, he could feel the evil crawling across his skin, knew how close the hunter was to his prey.

Long had he been a hunter… sad that it would end this way, the hunter hunted, cut down with neither honor nor mercy. And in his possession, the only key element to a precious new beginning. If he fell now, if the demons tracking and tracing his steps day and night ever caught up to him before he reached the Citadel… if that evil ever got its hands on the Element, it would be over. They would realize soon enough its purpose, and storm the Citadel with all their might, so they could use the archaic fortress to their own ends. Steeling himself against the moist chill in the air, he stepped forward, but hesitated after, sure he'd heard something whisper to his left.

That this was the end of the perilous part of the journey he'd embarked on made it all the more perilous. Here, the enemy would doubtless have bolstered their efforts, well aware how close he was getting to being far from their reach, and here would be their last, final, most desperate effort to win.

When silence reclaimed the scene despite his pounding head and aching joints, he released some of his tension and hobbled forward, hustling quickly through the tall, fibrous grasses native to the planet. Coming here alone had not been in the plans, but his guard and his companion had both fallen prey to what now hunted him, and he was the last – if he failed, there would be no one to pick up the Element and carry it on, no one to keep it from the hands of the enemy. Fright gripped his withering features as he struggled with his speed and his ability, certain beyond a doubt now that the hunter would bear him to the ground at any second. His harsh breath came in labored gasps as he clutched the satchel slung from a shoulder to his chest, the strap crossing his back forgotten in its purpose. Within the satchel, the Element, the last breath of hope there was that the enemy couldn't take their homes from them.

It had gotten worse, over the last few years… more and more enemy, sneaking into cities at night and by daybreak not a soul remained. Tattered remnants of once proud civilizations lay testament to the entire invasion. No one knew if anyone had fought, but damages to structures around the towns was minimal, if present at all. Only the mark of the enemy to tell what had happened, and then later a seething admittance that the ranks had bolstered.

Sweaty, exhausted, scared and worn to the breaking point, blessed relief cut through when he finally caught sight of his destination. There, the star fury class jet ship he would be taking to get free of the planet. A smile creased his wizened features, but he was a span from it yet and needed to stop for breath. As he struggled to see through the dense fog, back the way he'd come, he remembered warning the mission commander that he wasn't as young as he used to be, and this might well not be a mission worth his weight in attempt simply for who they had chosen to send on it – the only problem was that it was discovered the hiding place of the Element was realized to have fallen behind enemy lines only after the fact… as well as that the only one who knew the layout of the maze in which it had been carefully hidden was himself.

And had his on-the-spot knowledge not been present, they would never have come as far as this… but would it have mattered? Would it be worth it to get this far, spitting distance of the ship, only to fail? The Element would be in the hands of the enemy, and the Discharge would kill them all.

No one wanted to die, but he knew least of all did his people deserve it… not annihilation. Not by a long shot. Mustering what strength remained him, the old and ailing male made for the entrance on the rear of the vessel, certain now he could make it if he was just quick enough, wishing nothing more than to be there already and not need to make the span at all. He began to laugh out of pure relief when nothing happened adverse to progress as he made the final four yards of distance, but he stopped shy of entering, to stare with deadly calm and horror at the blood tray before him.

There… the mark of the enemy. If he failed this mission, the galaxy would die. But even as he sought the final step to victorious achievement, he realized all along he'd been facing down defeat, but in the most unlikely place to find it. He traced the lines of the figure with his eyes, his bony fingers cinching around their grip, without making a move. There, standing in a pool of sticky foul green ichor, one of the enemy, crooked, broken looking, deformed and disheveled. They all were. Some said it was a disease, others claimed it was spirits. Enormous claws the length of his height hung from one shoulder, what remained of the muscle on the other arm beginning to slough off, slumped at the wrist like loose cloth.

The smell was redirected by the gentle kiss of a breeze, barely enough to stir the fog and create phantoms where there was only air, but here… right here… he let go of his horror, and sagged to his knees, unable to fully comprehend why and how the gods could justify this kind of defeat. A sob escaped him, echoing back from within the ship's cavernous interior. The enemy gargled wordlessly, a dislocated jaw forming a slouched gape when the mouth opened to allow passage of some unidentifiable sound. He looked up, at it, seeing the odd protrusions from its chest wriggling in the chill air. Then past it, at the expanse of the vessel it had been in. Resolve for one last try steeled his nerve, and he pulled his legs from beneath him, poising for a lunge. If he could just get past it… he was old, but he was not weak, and there was only one. Right as the creature lunged forward, leaping off the blood tray at him, so too did he. He sliced the air right beneath its flying body, caught on the edge of the blood tray and rolled, to pile up at the base of the backside of a control console.

Now he was inside, the enemy was out, and he was alive with the Element intact. He clawed to his feet, clawed for purchase, well knowing that those doors were still open and the danger was not yet passed. He got around the console, the satchel slapping against his hip as he did so, and hit the release catch for the doors. They closed only in time to catch the enemy half in, and at their speed, even as the enemy clawed and snarled at the metal, slowly and patiently pincered it in half until with a final rending pop its torso landed on the floor. There, it began to gargle louder, and even as he recoiled from it in renewed horror as he realized it was nowhere near dead, it crawled towards him, rolling its deformed head at him as if trying to see him.

When it reached him, it sank those calcite claws through one of his legs, and pulled him from his feet even as he tried to grab the latch on the door of the locker that held a weapon. His scream of pain as he hit the deck was ignored, but even as the thing burst open at the back and fell limp, he knew he'd sustained more damage than the creature had given him.

Still, pulling the satchel from around his shoulder, he knew he was not yet defeated, even as the head-sized sickly yellow-white cell pried free of the larger creature's back, and crawled along its old shoulders and head to reach his knees – at which point the Element in the satchel came down on top of it, smashing it flat and spreading the insides all over his lap in a gory, disgusting mess.

Leaving it to lie, he leaned his head back on the bulkheads behind him, feeling the pain his old body was suffering quite acutely. "Lords of all, have mercy on my soul. I only wanted to save them…"

The whisper echoed back to him, even as the goo slid downwards from the raised blood tray to the floor.


	2. Without Saying Goodbye

**Scene Two; **_**Without Saying Goodbye**_

The Councilor stood straight and tall, refusing to sway and unbudging to the best of pressures. He'd made up his mind, and sat resolutely on his conclusion. But dissention had a way of creating a ripple effect, and in a confined pool, ripples always came back to the center from whence they had been created.

The Lone Heretic couldn't understand why his brothers had defied him at a pivotal moment of reform – having seen the Mirratord as in decay, he had set about to preserve it. But the best way he knew how combined with his inability to easily assimilate new ideas had caused much unrest within the ranks. People had protested. Some had vanished… others… some would never resurface, regardless where.

It bothered him to think it had come to this. He stood in the doorway to the inner Sanctum, where he'd learned the other Council members were gathered. He had not been notified or invited to this commune, and had come straightaway to determine the reason. He had gotten no farther than the first door of the foyer, however, when the one force he could not sweep aside had presented itself as a blockade.

Aardvark had her arms crossed, a cold look in her eye. Though her own dissention of his actions had been weak compared to some of the other member's protesting, she was a touch more resolute when a bold line was crossed. Her love for him aside, Aardvark was still a force of nature, and he had come to recognize this in more ways than one.

"Let me pass, Aardvark." He beckoned.

"They don't want you in there." She responded, toneless.

"As a member of the High Council, it is my right to attend every meeting."

"They are discussing what to do with you, Lone." She told him. "They don't want you to vote on your own fate."

"I was trying to _save_ this place! The Mirratord was little more than apathetic corruption, and I was the only soul who could see it!" His eyes narrowed, and he pointed at her. "You agreed."

Aardvark's cold gaze didn't waver. "Your actions have caused controversy, Lone. Kitty attacked me to get at you, the Admiral backed from this disaster before it could consume him… you just plowed right ahead even when it became evident what you had done was nolonger conducive to progress. Let it lie, Lone. Your action is nolonger accepted."

"You want me to leave?" he asked, incredulous. "Turn my back on them?"

"They would ask something of the kind." She acknowledged. "If you do not step down from your place in the Council, it is another viable option."

Lone studied her for a time, simmering in his own thoughts. "Why do you defend them? Why do you stay, when you claim you see it as well as I? What holds you here, Aardvark?"

Her reply was bereft of quite as much chill; "Honor."

"Come with me." Lone suddenly decided. "If I leave here, I want no connections to them. They have betrayed my interests and the interests of good health of the Mirratord itself. It is not what I created."

She cast a look through the door behind her, then focused on him. "Come with you? To where?"

He straightened, as if regaining a semblance of control, asserting again a position of power that he was used to. "The Halcyon will harbor us, true to its name. We will never need to hear sight or scent these treacherous curs again, whilst there."

She shook her head, sadly. "These people are my friends, Lone… as like kin."

"They are not friends, Aardvark. They attacked you – as you yourself pointed out. Called your honor and stepped upon it on the floor with unbefitting insults! Aozora _betrayed_ me… and you, too, as well as everyone else. That they choose not to see it is their flaw." Lone reasoned. "Come with me… come away, where we can find real peace where those purporting to be friends do not call insults at us or turn their backs on promises of loyalty."

In silence, Aardvark left the doorway, walking past him and out until the sun touched her helm. Turning back, she said, "Then leave the Council. Rescind your orders here and retire your name from their company. If you wish no trace, then break bonds now. And then go."

He inhaled, slowly. Finally, he bowed his head. "I shall." He turned slowly back to enter the meeting held in the Sanctum, and though Aardvark did not move, she heard him plainly as he spoke over the current elected speaker, and informed them all he was leaving. No one responded when he was done. None moved as he turned and walked back out. As he strode towards Aardvark, he extended a hand, and she took it to follow him away up the gravity beam of a waiting Phantom that Lone then piloted away.

She never said a word of departure to anyone.


	3. Time Will Tell

**Scene Three; **_**Time Will Tell**_

Light streamed through the transparent metal windows, outshining the overhead lights of the deck facing the sun. Having just crested from behind a planet, the battered cruiser was sitting derelict, much of her interior scraped from the frame and taken away, but despite this there was one lone warrior standing in the corridor. His hooves set at shoulder-width, one hand tucked into the other at the small of his back, his glistening eyes were focused through the clear metal into the void of space.

The Mirratord, for as much as they had survived the storms of ages past, had at last buckled under a strain not common at all… from within came the torment, from within came the cure, if at a late date indeed to have stalled the damages at all. Pragmatic, enigmatic, charismatic, arbitrary to the situation, the assassin-bard had come and gone almost with the troublesome Councilor, nearly collapsing under the strain as she smoothed the turmoil in the ranks while cutting away at the Councilor's ties until he was all but gone.

Watching the lone Phantom rise from the planet, Imperial Admiral Aozora Raiganimee understood one thing only at present; seeing the craft leaving so soon told him Aardvark had swayed the misguided Councilor from his mission, but he had known Lone for long enough to know that such a departure also meant Aardvark was gone, too.

If she ever came back, she would do so without her love, and it was in question what would remain of the once lively female who had of late lessened her drive and spunk as the stress and strain mounted upon her. He knew she felt responsible, felt somehow also tied to the cause more than any of the others, merely for her association with Lone. Many of the Mirratord had scattered to the four corners of the known Universe, but though Aozora had left as well, he had not abandoned his fellows lightly. Those on recon, those not immediately privy to the goings' ons, had remained for sheer lack of intel to reason from that there would be any such need to disperse.

Watching Lone leave after so many long years as such good friends – brothers at arms in more ways than one – was necessary, but painful. Seeing Aardvark disappear with him was more puzzling than anything else, as while often resourceful, she had only just recovered her wit from her near brush with death, and how much more she could put up with was greatly in question.

When the Mirratord had been whole, she had pledged to it fully. Broken now and scattered, clawing desperately at shredded remnants of what remained of a distant memory, trying beyond a hope to preserve it and keep it whole, she had suddenly up and vanished with the perpetrator that had scattered them.

Where did her loyalties lie, truly, if her main cry was that she could never be made to choose between her friends? Aozora held in his hand a data pad that contained her last message to him – sent after her realization that he was gone. In it she asked him why, and expressed in that she felt abandoned… but there was no forthcoming answer to his reply.

To why he had left, to his explanation of his point of view. To most everyone else's similar point of view of the circumstances, for that matter. It seemed a cold, cruel irony that almost directly following the split of the Covenant, the Mirratord should suffer a similar fate, driven apart from the inside, dispersed to the four winds like feathered seeds from a burst pod. At current, though he held sway with a small band of outcasts, all former members, he was not recognized as a Mirratord. He was instead a Heretic… and for it would be hunted down and killed.

Few understood the sheer complexity of the situation. Aozora heaved a tired sigh, and let his gaze drop. Aardvark didn't let go that easy – she had to be hiding something, some other method by which she meant to enact a healing of the broken, defeated Mirratord. Whatever it was, though, it was not immediately evident, and Aozora could only take it in faith that it was in fact there at all.

Touching the controls on his armor, his GEAR system charged and activated, swallowing his form inside a fat spherical distortion before he was gone, transported to some hidden craft that still had engines… and where a few fellows waited, loyal to the old order.

"Take us away. We have some hiding to do before this blows over."

"None of the Mirratord's old hiding places will harbor us now." Flyer responded, mutedly. "But I have a good idea for somewhere that we can stay for the time being."

"Inform the others. We need to gather and confer. Lai Tasha should be arriving tomorrow to give us intel on what the remnants of the active side are up to."

"And if we need to truly make an effort to disappear." D1NG0 added, from the other side. "If Lone has sent Hunters after us… if there is one thing we know, Admiral, it is how to tell one another out of a crowd of mundanes. We'd leave a trail as wide and obvious as a bumbling youth."

Aozora settled into a seat, and strapped in. "Then we shan't show our faces."

"Sub space in three." Flyer sighed. He raised his gaze to the viewport in sad repose. He could still remember when flying for the Mirratord had been fun. Now it was all but hearse work.

Leaning his head back, Aozora closed his eyes. Wearily, he sighed, "For the honor of the Mirratord, brothers."

"What's left of her, sir." D1NG0 whispered back.


	4. Resurgence

**Scene Four; **_**Resurgence**_

It was dark, moist, and smelled strongly of mold. Fungus grew generously all along the stone clad wall, the metal sheathing reduced to a rust coat. Slimy lichen hung from the arched ceiling of the hall, but though larger and blessedly better ventilated, the room beyond looked forlornly similar.

Evilkitty surveyed the underground chamber, and shook her head. The Mirratord had seen much better days. Here, a kind of "support group" for those who had decided to hang on despite Lone's overruling onslaught would meet, and determine what course of action was available to them. There was a small table, and on it sat a small hologram projector, deactivated. Seated on the rickety wooden bench behind said table was Kuro, doing something involving in her lap. If she had noticed when Kitty had come in, it wasn't immediately evident by any action.

Stepping through the door involved ducking a drape of slimy lichen, but once past the entrance Kitty saw more people. Spartan 249 stood off to one side, his arms crossed over his Mjolnir-clad chest. It was hard to read his expression through his shiny golden visor, but he looked much better since his brush with the Flood. When she waved slightly at him, he nodded back, showing he was paying attention, so she took a deep breath of the slightly clearer air and stepped deeper into the room. Finding a place to sit for the long wait for the Admiral's return, she sat there, eventually looking over at Kuro wondering if it was really Kuro or merely a wax interpretation of what Kuro would look like if she were curled over something in her lap.

But she looked up in response to Kitty's proximity, showing otherwise. She sat straight, then, and sighed. Oh, yes… this was going to be a long wait.

~*~*~*~

Slipping out through the forested border of the security platform's outer edges proved easily enough done, and blending with the shadows afforded there, the slight, lithe figure vanished quickly. Apart from the jungle, the Halcyon slept peacefully, undisturbed by the lone figure slipping away into the night.

~*~*~*~

Arriving at the backwater D-class planet in the deserted solar system proved shaky, what with the improvised stardrives, but the ship arrived intact, and their path smoothed out well enough following complete departure from slip space.

"Easy on me, girl, easy there." Flyer muttered, flipping switches and monitoring engine status with one eye while steering towards the little outpost that was exposed only by a recent mudslide in the area and would soon again disappear. "Easy as she goes…"

"We're there?" D1NG0 asked.

"That was fast…" Aozora prompted.

"Yes and no. If we hit atmosphere at the wrong angle or going too fast, we die in atmo. If I crash us… we die a little bit deeper into atmo." Flyer shrugged, toggling a switch that didn't appear to be responding. "Ach, ach, ach. Not now, come on."

Aozora lifted his head, then put it back again. "I find myself very much missing the old days."

"Don't we all?" D1NG0 added. "I still have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that my own brethren are now going to be given orders to hunt me down and kill me."

"Come _on_ you slack-eyed pickle-brained cow-hearted incestuous scrap of refuse!" Flyer smacked the dash, and toggled some of the controls again. Finally, as some things apparently began to work again, the pilot relaxed. "That a girl."

Behind him, the Admiral and D1NG0 shared a knowing, amused smile.

Flyer was turning them in the final arc when a proximity alarm suddenly screamed bloody murder, and he jerked on the controls so the ship jumped far out of its original place. The alarm abated, but even as Flyer caught his trajectory again, he sent a new string of non-expletive curses at the thing he'd just brushed with. "Fog-for-brains incompetent nonsentient walleyed nincompoop!!"

"What was that?" Aozora asked, suddenly very alert.

"I don't know – a bird? No…" Flyer drummed across some more controls. "It was going too fast for a bird. Maybe one of the guys decided to take the Banshee up." He shrugged.

"They know better – it would attract attention." D1NG0 put in.

"The attention of what, exactly?" Flyer asked, looking back at him. "There's nothing _out_ here."

"Shh." Aozora beckoned. "I get enough of this kind of thing from the rest of you – let me some peace, will you?"

D1NG0 heaved a resigned sigh, but swallowed his retort. "Yes, sir."

Flyer settled the bird on the landing pad, and sat waiting for the overhead doors to finish closing before he dared open the doors. The giant things carried a lot of dirt and other detritus, meaning each time they were opened they shed some down into the hole they covered, and walking through the dirt rain was never pleasant. Finally, they finished closing, and Flyer stepped out, looking up in time to see more than one person at the entrance to the far hall.

"Okay, Admiral… you lead." The pilot sighed. "This place still stinks of mold. You wouldn't think it wasn't that wet around here."

Aozora didn't comment, stepping past him and moving for the corridor that led deeper into the underground, striding down a steep flight of narrow stairs to a juncture where he turned left, heading down the narrow hall that opened up to the small circular chamber where many of the separatist Mirratord had clustered. Enough had arrived now that it was more than just one or two, but though not overly large, the room was not crowded especially.

Running his eyes over the faces, he noted Lai Tasha was not yet arrived. "Who have we?" He asked, a shortened version of his usual query.

"Everyone as before, sir." Came the reply. "Plus one… calls herself Echo." 249 pointed at a black clad warrior whose armor was both articulated and dull, the outline following her contours rather than the usual standard form of Elite armor. There were no bars, no insignia. What of her face he could see, though, struck a chord. Aozora froze to his spot, realizing this was all that remained of a once heavily decorated warrior-female, all her artistic expression wrought into her gear and written through her gait and poise.

Here, her posture looked statute, stony, almost criminal. There was no warmth in the pose at all, which was unusual to find when among friends. Still, her deep blue eyes didn't bore as they might have.

Aozora was about to say something when he felt the air behind him stir, and then Lai stepped past him, to survey the line of faces. Spotting the odd one out, he donned a puzzled expression. "Aardvark?"

"I'll never tell." Echo answered – although at that point it was quite obvious the answer was yes.

Aozora moved deeper into the room, feeling a sense of relief flood through him even as he settled next to his mate. If bereft of all other quality, Aardvark could be said to own an adhesive nature, and she kept her friends all very close… as well as to one another. Next to her, though, Kitty looked downcast, almost shamefaced.

Lai inhaled, and blew it out softly. "Well. Let us review."


	5. Hell Hath No Fury Like A Woman

**Scene Five; **_**Hell Hath No Fury Like A Woman**_

In ten days without word spare what Lai Tasha could give them, and their Supreme Commander missing somewhere in the Delta Quadrant, the orders issued by Lone had yet to fully dissipate. There remained several who had paused their usual duties to seek out and unbury their hiding outcast brethren, but though Lai couldn't track them all down, well knowing the policy of non-communication during a mission, he usually was able to tell the heretic band where not to be.

The concept was a good one, but all in all it didn't happen all that efficiently, leaving gaping gaps in the intel available for provision. Kitty knew this was just another bald, hard, cold truth, but all the same she couldn't help but grind her teeth at the Councilor's lack of mention about this world… there for supplies, Kitty felt she'd been caught redhanded, but though she was staying ahead of her hunter, she knew better than to surmise she could stay that way forever.

If she could just get back to her ship, and get out… the idea of being hunted down by one of her own was new… alien. It was a wicked case of cheating, as well. All her tricks, however modified, did little but keep that pace between them. Soon the last stride would be closed, and she'd have a fight on her hands. She didn't need a fight.

Her arms were filled with groceries, for crying out loud! Blessedly, her ship had been concealed fairly close, and she slipped inside and closed the hatch before dropping her boughten items into a holding net.

She was about to reach for the flight controls when there was a loud impact on the rear hatch, turning her head for half a second. She jumped into the seat and fired up the engines, but even as she got them to lift the ship, she got an integrity alarm and swore nastily at her antagonist.

The blockheaded idiot had stabbed a single-blade through the rear hatch! Stubbornly, though, she hit the gas and the ship shot out of the trees towards a nearby mountain ridgeline. There, she settled the ship on a flat mesa before jerking free of the pilots' chair to plug the dad gum hole with some pressure tolerant sealant. She looked at it for a time, speculative, before shaking her head and making up her mind on what to do next.

That her antagonist had caught a ride was evident, but she couldn't just kill them or abandon them in the middle of nowhere – as well fitted to survive as a Mirratord was, her prerogative was to _not_ kill her fellows, no matter how hard they tried to kill her. So she hit a sequence of switches and buttons so she turned invisible, the hatch hissed open, and the autopilot sent the ship into a mock emergency lockdown. By the time the first crack of daylight had formed around the seal, Kitty was nolonger where she had been standing.

Outside, the other officer had his camo activated, but he was slightly highlighted by the angle of the sunlight refracting through his transparent form. Kitty watched as he scoped out the interior of her bird, unable to understand why he couldn't see her, regardless of any camouflage she wore, the same way she was seeing him, plain enough. Their equally experienced eyes could pick out the best of hidden warriors in the darkest of corners, but Kitty's latest trick was a new one, even for her… happily, it appeared to be working very well. The other Mirratord cautiously stepped forward, but Kitty worked his nerves rather well by doing absolutely nothing even as she allowed him to board and look over the cockpit before coming back out scratching his head in a puzzled manner.

Grinning, she waited until he'd gotten back down into the blood tray and was looking over the scene he'd only just left, as though hoping to spot her out in that mess, before she touched hoof to deck in the same motion she used to twist her hips so her weight balanced left.

He had just enough time to spin about in fright and surprise before her right hoof connected hard and brutal with his head, knocking his helmet completely free and sending him tumbling dazed out of the ship. He scrambled for purchase once he stopped rolling, but Kitty wasn't about to give him time for recovery. Hooking her fingers under the lip of his fallen helmet, she swiped it from the decking and followed him out, so when he got partway sat up trying to get back upright, she brained him with it, laying him out flat in the dust, unconscious. Kitty stood there looking down at him for a time, before she dropped the helmet on him, and turned away.

"Teach that kid to mess with a woman." She muttered, boarding her craft and sealing it shut again. Her invisibility slowly wore off as the engine overheated, but she had the hole sealed up tight and was into the upper atmo long before she felt he might reawaken. All things considered, Kitty mused, he probably didn't even know what had hit him before he was out of it.


	6. Cybernetic Song

**Scene Six; **_**Cybernetic Song**_

The whole scene was backlit as hell. Nothing was going to pass that place without being seen, by a whole lot of security measures. Three auto turrets and over forty cameras. It was enough to make the paranoid gag… some of it had to be just for show, considering most of the cameras were all looking at places other cameras could see perfectly fine.

D1NG0 walked carefully across the top cable, unwilling to try walking on the bottom one when it meant he'd need to master balance while bent double. No, he'd also rather not cross the cables somehow and gain the shock of his life when the electric current cut through his body like a grounding rod. The event would likely kill him instantly, though, considering the amperages running through the cables.

The power station practically hummed with electrical life, even the air feeling charged and ready to pop someone a good one if they touched some conductive surface by accident. The Sangheili working the plant below never saw him, but though he didn't currently have his camo online, if he got zapped hard enough to fall from his perched walkway, he doubted the engine would outlive him by much.

Touching the wall on the other side, D1NG0 gingerly jumped from the cable to the floor of a raised indoor catwalk. It exited the wall and ran along the outside of it for a span before angling downward in a stair. Any sane person would have walked the floor and then used the stair, to get this far, but while D1NG0 was not precisely bereft of any sanity, he was more inclined to not get spotted while he was at it.

Having left the cable completely and become totally airborne before again touching down on the raised catwalk, he felt confidant he was not about to be shot down by an enormous ground-seeking charge straight off that tingly cable.

His hooves felt funny the whole walk down the inner corridor, a spongy, elastic, buoyant feel coupled with a feeling similar to that of a limb or extremity that had been cut off from blood supply and later revived. Needles stabbed into his soles with every step, prickling up his toes to his ankles and heels, but while it bothered him a little, he paid it as little mind as he could allow, slinking along the hall in search of his prize.

Parted from the main Mirratord base and all their former resources, D1NG0 had to find some other place to steal their plasma cores from, just to keep things like the heat on and Flyer's bird in the air. Normally he would not have been given such a mission as this, but he'd been the last one to call in and there simply were no Minors or Majors to shuck the duty to so that D1NG0 might find himself in charge of the mortification and decapitation of someone pesky. He carefully scoped out his path before he took it, ensuring no one was going to notice him, but right as he reached for the control panel for the force shield surrounding the cores, he felt someone touch his shoulder, and he froze in horrified shock.

A terrifying thought ran through his head; D1NG0, killed in the line of duty, leaving the mission of stealing plasma cores incomplete. Horrified that he could even _dream_ of failing such a pathetically simple mission, he cocked his head to the side to see who was behind him and if he had either time or will to bother to turn around. The face that met his eye nearly caused both of his hearts to stop simultaneously – but not in fear.

He let his shoulders sag as he rolled his eyes and groaned in agonized frustration. "For all the Gods, Aardvark!!"

"Is there some particular ill you have against me, D?"

He spun around to face her squarely. "I keep warning you, little female, and one day I won't get the chance to! You _beg_ disaster by continuously doing that to me! How did you even get here?? I came alone!"

She nodded. "I know."

He frowned. "What do you want? Can't you see I'm busy?"

She gave a light laugh. "I can see that – wouldn't want to stop the honorable mission of stealing power cores, no!"

"Some days I wonder if you and Kitty don't trade brains just for fun." D1NG0 grumped, crossing his arms. "You haven't answered my question."

"I came to tell you, the mission has been cancelled… mainly in that you have been reinstated as a Mirratord. We all have… the ones we can find, anyway." Aardvark said, her chipper tone melted into a matter-of-fact presentation D1NG0 found ill suited to the female. While quite deadly, and certainly stealthy enough, the truth of her actual personality demanded more than expressionless prose.

"Okay, so I walk from here empty-handed?" D1NG0 asked.

"More or less… if it suits you, since you're standing on top of your target anyway, you can proceed despite, but it isn't totally necessary. You fly in, in your own ship, you do your own investigation, draw your own conclusions… I hope you're a good artist."

He paused. "What? Why?"

"Drawing." She sighed, rolling her own eyes. "The conclusions? It was a _pun_ for Goddess' sake!" She shook her head at him.

He spared a glance at the cores, hooked neatly in their cradles behind the force shield, to protect the mechanism from obstruction. When he looked back again, though, he realized Aardvark was not there… as though she never had been. D1NG0 could only sigh, and shake his own head. She was good, good enough, certainly, but if she was good enough to keep dancing on that razor's edge for much longer, he felt he might not be as surprised as he might. She apparently owned a wicked sense of balance, and so loved to torment him with it.


	7. Reclaiming The Lost

**Scene Seven;**_** Reclaiming The Lost **_

A month had passed, and still and calm had settled over the Sanctum. Rejoined at the departure of The Lone Heretic, the Mirratord had found its feet and again stood. Members were still missing, simply unable to locate, and others were thought dead. One or two trickled back on their own, though, as the old caste reformed, and became whole again.

Glad to be back in better company than lichen-slick walls of a long since abandoned outpost, the outcasts settled back into their respective places. One day while exercising in one of the fields near the west entrance, Spartan 249 came in view of one of the upper balconies of the odd forerunner structure. He paused, wondering why it looked odd. Activating the zoom in his visor lens, he realized it was because there was someone standing on it, leaned on the rail looking out at the landscape. Likely from there one could see for miles… it was a dandy sniper position, should the place ever need that sort of guard, but otherwise it was a nice place to stand when one wanted to see the horizon past the tops of the trees. From the left, a carbine round zinged off his shields, and he turned, to chase down 09, who had just fired it at him. Wisely, 09 bolted.

Behind the lone figure, another passed, paused, and returned.

Stepping up to close the majority of the gap, Aozora paused shy of the rail, peering curiously at the female before him. He knew she knew he was there, but she didn't react.

"Something is bothering you, Aardvark?"

"Yes, inevitably." She responded, simply.

He sighed. "What?"

She turned, partway, her plain unmarked armor making her look smaller than she was. "I find myself split in twain… yet out of the many, I am but one. I cannot control anyone or anything and I do not deign to try. You hurt me, all of you, my friends, acting this way. We all, each, mean well, without desire to inflict pain upon those of whom we care, but it never happens that way, does it?"

"… what are you getting at?" Aozora asked, rather than pressing for a definition of her previous statement. Even if he asked point blank he wasn't liable to get much.

Aardvark huffed at him. "And on top of that, I have a metal arm! Can life become more difficult? You know this blasted thing gets damn cold in bad weather…"

He shook his head, smiling. "Sulk and smile, Aardvark, sulk and smile. You never change."

She cocked her head. "Should I?"

"Perhaps it is best that you don't." He amended, moving up to stand next to her. "Now we are rejoined, the Mirratord more or less whole again, there are matters to attend that escaped us during our inner turmoil."

"You can always just spit it out, Admiral." Aardvark admonished.

"You never do." He complained. "What's a taste of your own medicine, hm?"

"What, next you're going to sing my orders at me?" She scoffed. "Just tell me who needs killing, what needs retrieval, who I have to rescue and what I need to destroy, and leave it at that."

"I have others assigned to most of the outside activities. Yourself and Sol… some of the others… of you I ask inventory work. You're not fully healed from our last great battle, and you aren't ready to venture again out into the world to fight for the Mirratord."

She gave him her best hurt look, but all it did was make him smile.

"I cannot be swayed on this, Aardvark, don't even try. I refuse to waste my warriors in such a wanton manner."

Aardvark sighed. "Alright, fine… who's dimes am I counting?"

"Dimes? I want a head count. Who we have left, how many, and where they are. You can use the charts and the Archive… what there is left of it… but I don't want you leaving the base at least for now."

"How can I effectively mope if I'm confined to quarters I don't want to leave?" Aardvark complained. "I'm not porcelain, Admiral!"

"And you aren't Folded Steel, either." He cast her a mischievous smile, causing her to roll her eyes. He started to turn and go, but paused when he noticed her expression. "Was there something you wanted to ask?"

She hesitated, and the action drew him back.

"What is it?" He asked, now concerned it was something important.

"It's just…" She frowned. "I don't think I like the idea Councilor Lai has in mind for me… I've a mind to hide during the ceremony."

Aozora laughed, heartily, then, and clapped her on the shoulder. "Ah, beautiful Aardvark, you will in time come to understand the ways of the Councilors… he's logical, pragmatic…"

"Pain in my rear end." Aardvark added, out of the side of her mouth.

"Now, now, don't be like that." The Admiral admonished. "You deserve this promotion. Meet it with your head high…"

"Don't start with _that_ line again! I'll be there, already." Aardvark sighed.

Aozora gave her a hurt look. "What line again?"

"I have heads to count." Aardvark told him, patting his own shoulder in response, before walking away. Aozora watched her go, contemplating the hard _clank_ noise the pat had elicited when her metal hand had impacted his metal armor. She truly was a unique creature…

He headed for the Mausoleum, then, to oversee the rebuilding of much of what had been dismissed or forgotten in all the turmoil. The Mirratord was making a miraculous comeback, considering what ails had come to call of late – but the survival despite had steeled many of the members with the following logic – if they could survive this, there wasn't likely anything at all that could break them again.

The thought comforted the Admiral like few things could.


	8. Reverberation On A Metallic Drum

**Scene Eight; **_**Reverberation On A Metallic Drum**_

Days later, Aardvark was gone from the newly revived Mirratord base, but she hadn't gone far, not at heart. Before the male she'd once called to with love she now stood in loathing, almost unable to believe her own feelings had so reversed on her – how he made her mad! How uncaring of his actions he'd become. Their argument had been bitter, and she'd told him off.

His return had been harsh, scathing, cold, sharp as knives. What he'd allowed himself to fall to, what grace he'd fallen from, all honor gone beyond hope or desire, and he had the audacity to come back to her with that stain.

Her blades got into her hands, one came on. She accused him of treachery, now, calling him out for a betrayal of all she'd ever believed in, for the violation of her honor upon tricking her into performing upon his twisted will. He knew he could never convince her to see it the way he did, not now… not if she could take up arms against him. It was too late… and any love she thought she had had for him now was dead, gone, and forgotten. Like he soon would be.

The other blade lit.

He plucked his own from his belt, tried to warn her she didn't know what she was doing – no one to date had been able to beat him at this game, and while angered at her attitude towards what he found easily justifiable, he still wanted to keep her. He didn't know he'd already lost her, and upon that epiphany, she would never come back. He hadn't turned his shielding mechanism on, but then he'd fought and killed hordes before and never needed them. Aardvark was no overwhelming horde of enemy, but she was his weakness, and any strike against her directly would be instinctual, and instantly regretted, and he knew it.

She didn't need to be better than him. All she needed was to be her… and that was the one thing she could never get away from. Her screaming accusations pierced him like bullets, punching holes in his front and pouring out the lifeblood of his means. Nothing could be justified, to her, she simply nolonger would listen to them. Her last muted acceptance had been the first time she'd come to the Halcyon, and today she was leaving him. As much as he knew he would probably get more accomplished without her, she wounded him just with the thought.

He reached to block, met a blade aimed at his face, caught the other over his gut, and got kneed in the crotch. Staggered back, The Lone Heretic had only enough time to look up at the last thing he ever saw, at the lovely face of the Assassin-Bard twisted with ugly fury, her golden energy blades slamming down over his head.

It was the last betrayal he would ever make, but a cold beginning for her.


	9. Forget Me Not

**Scene Nine; **_**Forget Me Not**_

The weather was about as anomalous as it came – open sky in the north showcased aurora borealis, stormclouds crowding the east, south and directly above, pelted the place with rain. All while the system's star, from the west, made the moisture sparkle with rainbows and diamond inflection.

Imperial Admiral Aozora had never seen anything quite so bizarre. There wasn't anything quite like it, he was certain, but this was the first rainy season he'd seen on this world, and new attitudes were common to the recently transplanted Mirratord main base.

Turning from the domed glass ceiling, the Admiral walked down a flight of wide stairs and through the doors and down the hall, passing a spare three fellow Mirratord on his way through. He went to meet a transport that would take him into space to a waiting Cruiser there. Bereft of a need to hide from one another, bereft also with the breaking of the Covenant, of a need to hide from the universe, the massive ship's presence went largely unnoticed where any of the years before it might have been investigated. Arriving at the port, though, he found himself paused in the entrance watching as Longsword Flyer approached, very obviously aimed square at the Admiral.

"Flyer? You don't look happy."

"No, Admiral, I don't." He answered, coming to a stop. "For good reason, sir – I was out in the beta cluster and I came across a transmission. It wasn't even coded, Admiral, but it was calling for blood."

"And?" Aozora prompted.

"Mirratord blood, sir."

He paused. "The what, now? Who is this?"

"I don't know, the channel was generic, the voice wasn't data mapped, and the source feed was inside one of the more heavily populated areas in known space, sir – it's a hub for trade routes and military supply feed lines. There's no telling even if the sender was even still in the area by the time that signal reached beta cluster."

"Did they say why?"

"Something about how they had traced the means of a Councilor to us – and with our recent activity, gathering ourselves back again, mainly – we've become something a tad more than your average joe ghost sitting in a shadow nearby. We're physically recognized now, sir, and someone has it out for us."

"Understandable – which Councilor? And what else do they know that I need to?"

"The message didn't specify which of our noble Councilors had been compromised, Admiral, but I have a horribly crawling bad feeling about this whole thing. We still have hundreds missing…" He sighed. "And it's hard to commune with the ones out looking for those missing when it's SOP to run silent."

Aozora nodded. "I see. Run what data you have past Ace and Warbirds, between the two of them we ought to get something. In the meantime… keep listening, you might get a hint at a who or a where."

Flyer nodded. "Yes sir."

"Good work." Aozora saluted, watched him leave, then continued on past and through to his original destination… although he had a bit more on his mind than when he'd began that journey, admittedly.

Once the Cruiser had left orbit and was in the slipstream, he signaled Lai Tasha's comn to see if he was listening. If he wasn't he'd need to shoot a compressed encoded message to his receiver and wait possibly days until the Councilor checked his mail.

Luckily, he appeared to be right on top of his communications, and answered promptly. _"I'm surprised to hear from you so promptly, Admiral. Should I be concerned or impressed?"_

"Hmm. Have you been made aware of the transmission regarding a certain desire for the Mirratord's downfall, Councilor?" Aozora asked, activating a computer terminal and waiting for it to boot.

_"Interesting. Is that the extent of your intel, Admiral? You're not usually this vague."_ The High Councilor prompted.

"I'm looking into it as we speak, Councilor, and I have others working on it too. I thought you might want to be appraised of the situation immediately… considering this call to arms mentioned that one of your respective brothers in the Council has prompted this action through a breach of intel. Whoever we are looking at, sir, they know who to blame for their angst because they were able to trace back through one of you to us."

The silence on the other end of the line appeared stiff, a combination of disbelief and shock. Aozora paused, and looked down at the device.

"Councilor?"

_"I will call you back, Admiral."_ The line cut.

Aozora just raised his head, and grinned amused at the holographic screen before him. There was a message from Aardvark.


	10. Treacherous Repercussions

**Scene Ten; **_**Treacherous Repercussions**_

The end of the corridor opened up into a broad chamber surrounding the main battery core of the super carrier. Engineers worked busily on the various parts and pieces of the mechanism, disassembling and reassembling as they saw fit, maintaining the working order. Watching a pair go past, a large Unggoy sat with arms crossed on top of one of the bigger support beams. He could see a lot of the bay from there, and it kept him out of reach of any Jiralhanae who happened in. What he didn't see, though, was the other end of the blade who's point suddenly thrust out from behind his throat and into the air beyond.

The grunt gurgled quietly before tumbling forward, landing with a hard smack on the floor right in front of a passing Engineer. Nonplussed, the creature just scooped the body aside and continued on past, uncaring that the Unggoy hadn't died of natural causes.

Watching the Engineer depart, the grunt's killer slipped quietly from the perch down to the floor, and quickly scampered across it. At the center of the room, a detonator catalyst was placed and activated. Right as they turned to depart, a Brute stepped through the door, armed as though expecting to see unwanted company. There was nothing to see, though, not when the company slipped around the Jiralhanae guard like a zephyr of air and out the door. Moments later, a cloaked craft detached from the hull, and made wake for distance from the super carrier.

A heartbeat passed, and the pilot turned to look as the carrier's rear segment imploded as the hull around the area blew outwards, burning into the engine compartment as the singularity generator consumed the craft from the inside. A faint smile appeared on the Sangheili's face as she turned to the comn.

"Hey, Ace! It works."

_"That's great, Kitty… what did you use it on?"_

"I found this stationary carrier… it was just monkeys and their ilk, I figured no one would mind if I did your test there." EvilKitty told him, adjusting some of the equipment.

_"And did you take readings, this time? I'm running out of those things, you know, and I still haven't got any decent description on their function._

Kitty grinned, crossing her arms over her armored chest. "Yeah, this time I remembered to have the scanners on before I set it off. Say… when do I get to test one of these babies on a planet?"

_Uh… never?"_

She pouted. "Aw, come on! They're so fun!"

_"EvilKitty, you have more brains than you betray. Think about it a moment. What happens to each ship you hit with these devices? Do you really want to start erasing whole planets in the same manner? This is touchy science as it is."_

She sighed. "Alright, alright." She watched as the last of the ship disappeared, the last little flicker of burning atmosphere and vaporized hull slipping away into a lightly sparkling anomaly that had formed in the middle of where the super cruiser had once been. "Well, that was the last one you gave me, and now I have the readings you wanted. Now what do I do? I'm bored out here."

_"No one can get bored quite as fast as you can, EvilKitty… it's a singular talent of yours. Let me look through my notes and see what is in your area."_ Something ruffled in the background, so Kitty drummed her claws on the comn. _"Augh! Don't do that, yeesh. Well, I have a remnant of a scan from somewhere spinward of your location. You want to check that out?"_

Kitty shrugged. "Sure, why not. What is it?"

_"It's a planet with Forerunner stuff embedded all over it. There was a really little energy signature on the surface somewhere on the southeastern hemisphere that I thought I might check out someday when I didn't have so much else to do. You know I'm still working on that weapons' permutation for Warbirds."_

Kitty made a purr noise, as she steered her craft along the course plotted through the data she'd just been sent.

Acetylcholine blew a tired sigh at her for it. _"You're sure you're up to handling possible Flood containment facilities? Some of them are so old they aren't contained anymore."_

"Sure, no problem. As long as it isn't a Gravemind or a genuine infestation, which I doubt, considering it hasn't made any news that a whole colony went missing. They got to have people to turn into food in order to have combat forms, you know. And a real army means a whole lot of people got et."

_"Yes, EvilKitty… as if I couldn't have figured that out on my own."_

She giggled happily. "See! I'm not totally lost on the science stuff."

He just sighed.

"What's our last known updated member count, do you know?" EvilKitty asked, after a moment of silence in which she fully expected he'd cut the transmission but he didn't.

_"Um. A hundred fifty one. That's a rough guess… I only glanced at it."_

"So that's all that have come back or all that we know the locations of, or what?"

_"Well… I do know that directly following her promotion Aardvark left. She's out there somewhere just like you."_

EvilKitty got quiet for a moment, speculative, wondering what, if anything, she would say to her fellow should the past ever be brought up between them. There really was no justification for attacking Aardvark's honor in an attempt to wound Lone, but the words had been spoken before Kitty had realized her cross-wired brain had just damaged a friendship she hadn't meant to harm at all.

_"Hello? You still there?"_ Ace asked.

"Yeah, I'm still there." EvilKitty mumbled, all the tone and inflection gone from her voice. "If I recall correctly, didn't the Admiral tell her not to leave the base until further notice? Because she'd been recently fitted with a new arm, and stuff?"

_"Those were her standing orders, yes, but between you and me, who here has ever known a day when that female ever really followed orders? She gets the job done, don't get me wrong, but she does everything her own way. Makes at least one person mad every day. I'm sure today is the Admiral's day. Or tomorrow, depending on how long it takes him to realize she's gone… he's not slow, but he is elsewhere and last I looked, rather dead-set on some task I didn't catch. I heard there was some faction out in beta cluster raring for Mirratord heads. Know anything about it?"_

"Uh, no. It's all news to me." Kitty shook her head, focusing on the screen ahead of her and trying valiantly to see it while her mind whirled with all the sudden new information. "I'll contact you when I make planetfall."


	11. Echoes Of A Buried Past

**Scene Eleven; **_**Echoes Of A Buried Past**_

It looked like holiday. Or, rather, holiday where the pyrotechnic festivities had gone horribly awry. They all appeared to be enjoying it despite, though – an odd rally to be sure, considering what little was said had nothing to do with the usual that Jiralhanae liked to roar about. Blood and death and fighting and all. No, this time it was something about taking back some position or something.

Like that mattered at all.

Traveling here to find lost charges, Aardvark Echo had instead realized a large clan of Brutes, and while in their midst there was her target – a Minor she'd tracked to this quadrant and spent the better part of the past three days zeroing in on – he didn't appear to think he had the best seat in the house.

In fact, anyone in his position, regardless of ties or loyalties, or even species, would have felt the same way. Being strung up on an energy coil between bracing poles would do that to practically anyone. And those things were always coded – she'd need to slice the poles off at waist height just to disengage their clamp on the coils keeping the Mirratord between them still.

How they'd caught him was of interest, but what they meant to do with him was better. Aardvark had a few ideas, had heard some stories – that of her own little sister was testament enough – but this was a new era, and new ideas for those who were thought to have wronged the hunters would probably be new and unusual… doing it the old way, regardless of the action of mention, just wasn't in style.

Slipping between the crowd members was tricky, but even though she'd been hit more times than she liked and had even been smashed once between two Brutes, they were _all_ jostling and the slight Sangheili went unnoticed amid it all. The going was slow, and she was a little concerned she'd need to kill them all just to extricate that Minor, because her cloak was getting warm already and she wasn't even all the way to him yet. From her vantage behind all those pushing and shoving Jiralhanae, Aardvark couldn't see to identify the warrior, but she knew he was worried.

Being tethered to a set of bracing poles was always bad. Even if you weren't beaten to death by those around you, the device, if charged, would burn anyone right off their skeletons. Usually it took many long, tormented hours to accomplish that, but it still wasn't pleasant. Aardvark got to the base, and began to ascend it, despite the great lack of handholds and how smooth the dias was. Standing up between him and his spectators, though, caused his expression to turn to surprise.

"Holy camoles."

"Hello to you too." Aardvark greeted, lifting her single-blades from her belt. "Up to a run this morning?"

"Yes, ma'am." He answered, remembering to keep his voice down. "Standing still quickly lost its allure today."

"Good, because there are a lot of them and only two of us, and I really don't think I brought enough batteries to cut them all down. So unless you feel up to pummeling them all into fertilizer one at a time…"

"Not especially, but I did used to have some good-sized explosives… they're on bright-eyes over there, now."

"And your swords?"

"He's got those, too."

"How did you get captured?" Aardvark asked, turning the hilts over in her hands rather than activating them.

The look he gave her made her respond with one of her signature evil smiles. Her features were so sweet and innocent looking that such an expression tended to imply so much more depth to her personality than being merely sweet and innocent. She was, in fact, neither.

"I asked you a question, Mirratord." Aardvark reminded him.

"I was spying on them – it was my assignment. When I was discovered, I had to kill a bunch of them – "

"How many is a bunch?" She asked, quirking her head to one side.

"Uh… seven."

"High Councilor Soulguard could have killed seven without realizing he'd done it, Mirratord. You're not supposed to get found – or captured. You know what the rules are."

"Yes, ma'am, but at current… I was actually hoping you were here for more benign reasons, ma'am."

She laughed, and the whole crowd drew silent and stared at them. Right as her laugh finished, she slowly trickled into view, parts of her gaining color before they stopped being transparent. Turning from her fellow Mirratord member, Aardvark looked over the gathered crowd, her smile remnant. "Look at them. What do you see?"

The Brute standing to the left on the dias gave a start, staring unable to believe his eyes at first. The Minor glanced at him, then looked over the crowd. "I see a whole lot of hairy Brutes, ma'am."

"Do you know what I see, Mirratord?" She asked, looking back at him, her inner thumbs hooked on her belt.

He met her gaze. "No, ma'am."

"Target practice."

Her right arm shot out to the left, and inside a brilliant flash of showering sparks and molten droplets of metal, that pole blew off at waist-height. Spinning back, her left arm shot right, and the same repeated on the other side. The Mirratord Minor was freed, though he was still wearing the cuffs the energy bindings connected to. He rocked backwards even as she balanced left, turned on that hoof and met the Brute wearing his gear with both swords punching up through it's chin and out through the top of its head. Separating her swords rather than drawing them out, the Brute's face fell free of its head, smacking into the dias before rolling into the crowd, which had begun to react to the sudden display contrary to their plans.

Aardvark dove into them, cutting them down by droves, often taking out more than three inside each motion she made for their sheer numbers and how close they were to one another. Most fled for weapons, but when a thirty-foot-wide circumference had been opened, she turned and walked back to the dias, letting them flee. Walking up to the top of it where the other was, she flicked off her blades. "You see?"

"I don't understand." He offered.

"No? Was it not explained to you in detail when you were first brought into the fold?" Aardvark asked. "I realize you're new. I was new too, once. I was the one they caught in the Council Chambers, when Soulguard was addressing his fellows with reports from the frontlines regarding the very coalition you and I have pledged ourselves to." She pointed a hilt at him. "You should be ashamed of yourself, young one. There is more than meets the eyes to the Mirratord. You don't achieve the reputation we have by allowing yourself to get captured."

"You were." He countered, weakly.

"Yes. I was. By the Mirratord. Because I was not one of them, because that is what they do best. Because I had not learned how to perfect the art of stealth. I was good – but they were better. Now I am one of them, and I am better, too. You have to be – you are either better than your opponent or you are dead. Is the Mirratord dead?"

"No…"

"We have made being better than the enemy into an art." Aardvark clipped her swords to her belt. "I want you to take my ship and return to base immediately. Take whatever intel you have gathered from this place with you, prior to your capture and after. Tell them everything. I am going to follow this a little deeper, and gather what I can to find out what makes them think they have a ghost's chance in picking this fight."

"I know that part already." He offered, standing a little straighter.

"Yes?"

"I heard one of the Brutes telling another that they had found out which Councilor was responsible for the majority of the damages done to their forces, and they'd discovered his methods, too. They went after him a week ago, for direct vengeance, but the strike team came back with news he'd been aced by someone else. Now they're being forced to settle for indirect revenge, by tracking down and catching us… the method. The Mirratord was his method."

"Someone else…?" Aardvark asked, tilting her head to one side in a puzzled manner. "You don't mean to say the Councilor…"

"The Lone Heretic."

"Damnations." She whispered, shaking her head. "You haunt me even in departure."

"What?" He prompted.

"Nothing. Go… do as I have instructed. When I am done here I will contact the Admiral and he'll send extraction. You just concentrate on not losing my ship – I had Ace and Flyer both work on that baby so I don't want anything to happen to it. Understood?"

"Not a scratch, ma'am." He promised, before moving off. He'd seen the ship land – but hadn't thought much of it when the majority of the vessels the Brutes used were old Covenant ships, and Aardvark's bird looked like a sharpened Seraph fighter. She was something of a speed demon, living for the thrill of going fast enough to kill herself on a tree if she hit one. Still, with guidance systems installed by and lessons from the legendary pilot Flyer himself, she hadn't yet done such a thing, and really didn't appear too inclined to any time soon.

He got to the vessel without impediment, and inside, warming up the engines and taking the flight back to the Mirratord at best speed – which blew his eyelids back even without the g-forces that were dampened by a standard-grade ship function that allowed slipspace travel.

Aardvark watched her ship leave the atmosphere, before turning away to follow those Brutes down the path she'd let them walk earlier, beginning to stew all over again over the actions of her former love. What ill he had wrought seemed to mount now the truth be known, and it didn't appear to slack off in the least. No one wept for fallen Brutes, but it created a problem when one person caused such a mess that the remaining ones came after him in the end. Now all that was left was her.

Steeling herself against the massive tide, she reactivated her camouflage, lit her swords, and began all over again. It could take a while simply for the camp's mere population.


	12. Callsign

**Scene Twelve; **_**Callsign**_

_"If you're even pretending to listen, you had better pick up this line right this instant, Admiral. You're going to kill me when you hear what I have just learned."_

A little shocked at such a claim, Aozora touched the reply button. "Alright… shoot."

_"Ah, so you really are there. Good. I finished my tracing, and coupled with what the dispatches I've sent out have given me, I have some very interesting and equally very bad news. There is a Jiralhanae faction that formed out of two broken Clans, combining forces and ideas and intel, and now as a new, single Clan, they're grouping for a return strike against perceived enemies."_

Aozora gave the comn unit an odd look. "Okay."

_You recall the mess Lone made of our ranks? Well, he apparently has a habit of doing that, to ally and enemy alike. Unfortunately for us, he was unsurprisingly not very subtle, and now his primary victim knows who to antagonize for their grief."_

Imperial Admiral Aozora gave that some thought. "Go on."

_"Well… according to what I've been told… someone, somehow… they caught up to him, believe it or not within his own fortress, and killed him there. As hard as it is to imagine that happening, considering what we've all seen him do, and how he did it, this little detail made a goodly number of this Brute faction rather mad. Denied him, now they're after his tool – the Mirratord, namely. And, they had caught someone."_

Aozora froze. "Who?"

_"One of our newer members. Goes by the name of Kedzuel. We lost contact with him three days ago… but it gets worse, Admiral. Early this very morning, we got a communication from him. He'd gotten away, but only by the skin on his teeth, and because he'd been retrieved and freed."_

Aozora relaxed, but not all the way, sensing there was more bad news waiting to come out. "That's good… who knew he was out there?"

_"That's just it, Admiral. No one. He was moved to a new location directly after capture. That little assassin-bard you like so much really does have wicked senses, finding him that fast. But before you go on about how you thought you told her to stay home, she isn't on the ship with Kedzuel. She stayed behind, Admiral."_

Aozora dropped his face into his hands. "She's going to commit suicide."

_"Admiral?"_

He looked up, meeting Kuro's gaze. "She's the one who asked Lone to return to our halls, she's the one who was able to make him leave when he got out of hand, and she's the one who rebuilt us and made it possible to regather our numbers. She feels responsible for what happened to us. So now he's gone and all is back to as close to normal as we can get it… she's been trying to absolve herself to an action she knows she can never take back. She's going to get herself killed." Aozora smiled sadly when Kuro laid a hand on his shoulder. "Do we know who killed Lone, if it wasn't this… faction?"

_"No, we don't."_ There came a breathy sigh that only Lai Tasha could emit. _"So we go and we collect her, and then what?"_

"I had hoped to make that connection in the time she was stationed within our own base, but now I don't know how to begin. You and I both know she cares a great deal for us – all of us – we are a secondary family to her. If she gets it into that stubborn thick skull of hers that she's bad for us, you know as well as I that she's never going to come back."

_"So, we'd need to not only catch up to her, but catch her, and disarm her, and then maybe if it's at all possible, get that idea away from her? How many females have you changed the minds of, Admiral?"_

Aozora paused, looked at Kuro, then back at the comn. "None thusfar."

_"Well, that never stopped you in any other endeavor, but you'd best have the whole damn Mirratord chorusing your every word in earnest or she'll never bite."_

"That part might be hard." Aozora admitted.

"Let me talk to her." Kuro offered. "Woman to woman."

Aozora looked over at his mate, and smiled sadly. "Even you'll be needing help with the force of nature that is Aardvark, love. Take Kitty, if you can find her. I know Kitty thinks she can never look her in the eye again, but Aardvark has probably already forgiven her."

Kuro nodded. "I'll need to get my armor out again."

_"Does this mean we have a plan after all?"_ Lai asked, sounding hopeful.

"I hope it does, Councilor." Aozora responded, watching as Kuro got up from beside him and went across the room, admiring the way she moved as she walked. "We still need to put together a counterattack plan for the Brutes."

_"I'm already on that. Our friend Kedzuel gave us a pretty penny on that faction, and I have a good idea what they're really up to. Meet me on the new MSC Alliance… I hear it's still under construction, but that just means it'll be a quiet place to talk."_

"Yes, Councilor." Aozora rose, and gathered up his own armor, well knowing a lack of a time specified meant, usually, right away. He saw Kuro off on her quest to find EvilKitty before leaving himself, though, taking the first vessel out to the shipyard orbiting a binary star where the Mirratord's first Super-Carrier was being built. Dubbed the _Alliance_, the craft would harbor the new age of allied aliens – Humans and Sangheili, a small number of Grunts, and even fewer Lekgolo. That anything could be said for the Hunters to any loyalty was really something, as they were as liable to go berserk on their own side as they were to murder the enemy with ruthless brutality to shame any Jiralhanae and then pause to recite war poetry.

On the ship heading that way, Aozora was going over the extent of Kedzuel's report that Lai Tasha had wired to him when he ran into a few members he didn't expect to see going in that direction. Folded Steel, Spartans 09 and 249, and D1NG0. The three Humans appeared calm enough, but D1NG0 had that look in his eye he usually wore when something was about to go down, and he was going to be in the middle of it.

"D1NG0?" The Admiral asked.

"Hello, Admiral." D1NG0 greeted, clicking his mandibles as the three Humans grinned in their own way, baring all their teeth. The crinkles around their eyes were the only way to really tell if they meant it as mirth or madness. "You look unhappy."

"We have problems afoot even before we have a chance to inhale in peace, D1NG0, I'd say I was unhappy, yes."

The grins disappeared. "What's going on, Admiral?" Steel asked. The Mjolnir helmet under his left elbow rolled between his hands and tucked under his right.

"We've identified an organized faction of Brutes… who not only know about us but where we are and they want us dead. What's alarming is not that part, though."

"Yes?" Spartan 249 prompted.

"Even Jiralhanae have enough smarts to not pick a fight with something they cannot beat. This whole operation stinks of confidence. They have something… something we don't know about, and it makes them think they stand a chance." Aozora said. "I'm on my way to meet with High Councilor Lai Tasha to discuss it further."

"Who do we have still in the field?"

"Most of us have been located – that leaves most of those still out being ones we have sent. The exception is the one who pried our main source of intel from the jaws of these Brutes; Aardvark left the base."

"I'll bet I know how." Steel piped up, before anyone else could speak. "She had some pretty wicked stuff installed on that bird she likes to fly around – says it's hers – it could get past just about anything without leaving so much as a smear to mark passage."

"How, perhaps, but that doesn't explain why." Aozora said, crossing his arms. "Kedzuel was hidden from us – moved away from his assignment. She found him within three days of his disappearance. That either means she was on his trail watching him make the tracks or she was in that system for some other reason and he showed up in front of her without her realizing he was coming. Either way, she got him out and stayed behind."

"What? All by herself?" Steel squeaked. "Last I heard, Ace said her bionic attachments weren't fully integrated, and she could experience a real severe technical difficulty right when she doesn't need to."

"Yes, that's why I forbade her from leaving. But that didn't stop her." Aozora told him.

"What's the plan?" D1NG0 asked.

"Kedzuel said she told him to send me to get her. I don't really know what to make of that." Aozora shook his head. "She knows I'm not going to be pleased with her for running off like this…"

"Maybe she's on to something we're missing?" 09 offered. "What hasn't been said yet?"

"Councilor Lai mentioned something about how he'd derived a possible goal the faction is after – but he didn't say what that was." Aozora said. "That's in part what we're meeting about."

"What do you want us to do, in the meantime, sir?" Steel asked.

"Prepare." Aozora sighed. "Just… I don't know what's to come. Whatever comes… prepare. All I know is that when it hits, it'll hit hard, and it'll hit fast."

"Yes, sir." Steel dropped his helmet over his head, and latched it down. "We'll be ready."


	13. Plans Of Escape

**Scene Thirteen; **_**Plans Of Escape**_

Nine days had passed, and EvilKitty had never felt more bored out of her skull than right then. But she was finally arrived, and at long last she could actually do something for a change. She wished Ace or someone hadn't been so busy with other things, so she could have someone at the very least to talk to or bug, but they had all had their own tasks to accomplish back at base or elsewhere in the galaxy, and so she had to go out alone.

Obtaining a stable orbit, she turned to her instruments, and did a brief scan so she'd know what to expect. The planet was riddled deeply with Forerunner technology and structures – nothing that out of the ordinary. There were several such places, actual worlds embedded with Forerunner stuff, not just the Rings, left for centuries. At times, religious fanatics would inhabit them, but the majority of the discovered places still lay empty. This was one of the empty places. Right as she was about to do a vicinity sweep to see if she shared the space with anyone in orbit, a proximity alarm screamed, the auto-pilot kicked on, and Kitty was dumped on her asş with a startled shriek. The sudden motion generated a smashing force of twelve gees the dampeners couldn't compensate for all of quickly enough to prevent her from feeling it.

Grabbing the controls, she picked herself back up, and peered out the front view, scowling as the cloaked vessel fifty times the size of her own ship sailed smoothly past overhead. "Okay, so I'm not the only caller to this world's doorstep today. What are you doing here, though?" Kitty sat down in the pilot's seat, and dialed up some more instruments. A tiny blip might show up on the cruiser's sensors, but that would be all.

The hacker program did its job swiftly and efficiently, and latched on firmly so Kitty could look into all the deepest recesses of the vessel above her own. She scrolled through most of it, skimming, but when something of interest turned up – 'deployment pattern plans' – she dug deeper into it to see what it meant, who was being deployed and against whom.

"Hey!" Kitty suddenly exclaimed. "You bastards. You think you can pick a fight with _us_?" She scrolled through more data before she found something else of interest, but all of it was being downloaded into her own ship's core, so even if she was discovered and the hacker booted out, she'd still have all of the stuff she was looking at now. "Okay, so you're also after something… else… ooh, it's here, is it? How's about if I take it from you before you get your hairy paws on it at all?" She giggled, suddenly feeling happy again, with some available mischief to get into.

She put the console on standby, allowing it to continue to hack through the cruiser's programming, while she attended other matters. Stepping into the back, she picked up a Carbine and a pair of t-22DERs, attaching the Carbine to her back and the DERs to her thighs before stepping into the drop pod. When the view of the interior of the ship she'd arrived in disappeared behind the sealed door in front of her, she folded down her environmental helmet permutation, and waited for the ride down to end. It would do so with the sharp thump that would be followed quickly by the bright crack and hiss of the front half of the drop pod flying off.

At the surface, the front flew away and she jumped out rifles in hand, but she was alone, oddly enough, and the pod's foot had embedded in the top of one of the Forerunner structures. Stepping gingerly over to the edge, Kitty looked down, before recoiling, dizzied by the intense height. That was a _long_ ways down!

Taking a breath, she seated her rifles again before taking the edge in hand and slipping down the slightly tilted sidewall to the ground so she'd be going slower than thirty-two feet per second per second for Gods only knew how many feet to the bottom.

When she reached soil, Kitty's first impression was of an unspoiled paradise – but her second impression came and dispelled that first one when her HUD gave her an environmental reading of the place; it was absolutely _filthy_ with airborne Flood spores. Apprehension tingled at the back of her mind as she scanned her surroundings anew, wondering what she'd see – was the whole planet empty, then? Flood spores would infect anything – including larger animal life forms.

Taking her rifles back in hand, Kitty moved carefully forward, noting the ground was spongy but fluffy as yet – not a single track, not even of avian or insect nature. Her own hoofprints looked baldly obvious, an inch deep every time she lifted a foot. Turning, she looked back, and saw the first few had begun to fluff back out again, so perhaps that might be why there were none visible – her own, so recent as they were, were already in the process of disappearing, even as she made them. Assured that she wouldn't be leaving a big black line through white sand for the Brutes to follow and find her by, Kitty moved forward, paying attention again to her surroundings and not her trail.

She covered several miles before she came across enemy movement, but even as she drew closer to investigate, something else caught her attention. There, at the treeline of an overgrown lichen-infested forest, a figure from the buried past, crippled, hobbling forward, grunting with each breath, the deformed features drooping from the warped skeletal frame.

Kitty recoiled in fright even as the badly damaged Flood form collapsed shy of the Brute's encampment. Four walked out to meet the fallen form, conferred around it for a moment, then smashed the infection form inside before leaving again, as casually as one might in the presence of such a parasite.

Disgusted, sickened, and horrified all at once, Kitty felt she would have vomited at the sight had she eaten anything that recently. Swallowing hard, she moved forward, stealthily again, this time looking for where she might locate the Brute's treasure. Getting it from them if it was Forerunner would be a good idea, but angry commanders erupted from the main entrance to a building nearby, showcasing how long and hard they'd been looking for it fruitlessly already. This was not going to be as easy as she'd hoped.

Infiltrating the perimeter, Kitty got inside, and looked at their equipment. She frowned when she saw the item of desire; "A Ringworld _Index_?? Here?" She asked, incredulous. But the Library here, if that's what it was, had been emptied. The Index was gone from it. This much the Brutes had discovered the hard way. Kitty tried to glean more from the available data, but that was it – where the Index had gone, who had taken it, even when it was taken… missing data. Shrugging, Kitty turned away, escaping the compound unnoticed and setting out back for her insertion area. She got halfway there before she realized she'd been in such a hurry she'd failed to notice when her tail had showed up – but it was there, now, as obvious as a super-stealthy individual could be. Turning, she paused, wondering how best to come upon the other person when they abruptly broke the unwritten law of ghosting trails by showing up right in front of her, and deactivating their camouflage at the muzzles of both of her DERs.

EvilKitty choked on her next breath, before putting the guns down. "Aardvark?"

She didn't speak, only raising her hand, and in it was a brightly glowing T-shaped item.


	14. Acetylcholinesterase

**Scene Fourteen; **_**Acetylcholinesterase**_

Aozora, Lai Tasha, D1NG0, Warbirds, and the three Spartans were all together in the same room, exchanging information in an almost rapid-fire succession, when they were interrupted by the entrance booming open, and the sound echoing around the growing sound of running footsteps.

"What in creation??" Lai Tasha asked, turning to see as Acetylcholine suddenly shot through the door and slid a whole foot on the non-slip floor to a stop before taking them all in inside a single harsh, quick breath.

"You have got to get that radial barrier decommissioned before someone _dies_, Councilor." The scientist recommended. "I tried nine times to get your attention before I realized why you weren't responding."

"Why did the door open before you got to it?" Aozora asked. "They're not supposed to do that, are they?"

"No, I crossed some wires so I wouldn't have to wait for them each to open as I made my way here. It'll be fixed soon enough, don't worry about that. I have news – really urgent, really bad news."

"Well, what is it?" Lai Tasha beckoned.

"EvilKitty just contacted me. I sent her to look for something out in beta cluster that I'd found a year ago and never bothered to investigate, and somehow she wound up a mite past that sector – she found a ship full of Brutes over a planet once heavily populated by Forerunners, an empty planet-bound Library, and a Ring Index."

"Gods, no." Aozora swore. "The Brutes would never!"

"They didn't get their hands on it – " Ace assured him, before looking back at Lai. "She also found Aardvark – and so long as they have that Index, there's nothing going to shield them from it being detected, and they're on the run."

"Where to?" D1NG0 asked, tensing. He wanted to move – all of them did. There was action to be done, and holding still felt wrong. But he wanted to know where to move to before he ran off.

"Anywhere." Ace shrugged. "They got out of range – and that's _far_ out there – before I got all the information out of Kitty. That Brute ship is hounding their ass hard. It'd be a safe bet those girls won't be holding still for a breath and those Brutes aren't going to let them get away at all. In fact, it's a safer bet that they'll be calling in all kinds of other Brute ships to help them corner that Index, Kitty and Aardvark both. If they catch up to them for even half an hour, Councilor…" He looked at Aozora, "Admiral… they won't survive it. What I did get from Kitty, they want that Index pretty badly."

"Why? Why fire the Rings now?" Steel asked. "After everything we spent stopping the _last_ madman trying that stunt…"

"I don't think they want to fire the Ring… which is scary. If they aren't going to use it for what it was meant for… even I have difficulty refitting Forerunner tech for other purposes, Steel. This is worse than just having the Rings go off. These Brutes are up to something, and they're dead serious about whatever it may be."

Lai Tasha and Aozora shared a look.

"Admiral – get the rest of your Strike Team and some others you trust are capable to meet the needs of the mission, and I want you to go and get those girls back – intact – and don't let those Brutes get away while you're at it." The High Councilor instructed.

"Yes sir!" Aozora waved to the three Spartans and D1NG0 before leaving in a hurry. Ace watched them go, before looking back at Lai Tasha.

"What's the plan?"

"The more I learn about this Brute faction, the less I like it." The Councilor sighed. "Things have been going downhill ever since I heard the first word about it. I want you on that team, Ace – if they have an equivalent of you, I want it dead. And it takes one to know one." Lai Tasha leveled his gaze at the scientist. "Find out everything you can. Hack every food synthesizer if you have to. I want to know everything there is about this… 'faction'. This is bigger than the Flood threat."

"And EvilKitty and Aardvark, Councilor?"

"Bring them home alive, would you, Ace?" Lai Tasha asked. "Those girls have never failed us. In turn, it would be most inappropriate of us to let them down when it is they who need us."

"Alright – we're leaving immediately?"

"Good hunting… and you might want to hurry out. The Admiral doesn't know you're coming and he'll leave without you if you aren't onboard when he cuts loose."

Ace sighed. "Déjà vu all over again…" And he ran out the same way he'd come in.


	15. Cravings Like Addiction

**ACT TWO: **_**Running From Someone Else's Past**_

**Scene One; **_**Cravings Like Addiction**_

In the shadow of a sun coiling through space like a giant, flaming paisley, feeding into a singularity a quarter the size of EvilKitty's ship, the three sat in silence, watching as the bigger Brute vessels prowled, unable to scan for all the interference the feeding black hole gave off, and unable to spot them through a window for their cloaking mechanism.

Finally, Kitty looked over at Aardvark, wondering what, if anything, she could dare to say. She saw Aardvark's gaze in her lap, the armor peeled from her false limb as she worked a metal knife tip down in the seams, prying up mud and what looked like lichen bits. Her whole person was smeared over with the same, but apparently she felt her real self could handle it better than her fake half. Trouble happened when Aardvark proved to not be double-jointed enough to get the back of her own elbow effectively.

Kitty took first her arm, then the knife from her other hand. "Here, let me help you." She proceeded to pick the mud out of the back of Aardvark's arm, feeling awkward as hell.

"Something bothering you, Kitty?" Aardvark asked, her voice soft, her tone forgiving.

"Yeah, something is." EvilKitty admitted, wishing it wasn't so obvious when she was disturbed by something. Her usual flighty, happy-go-lucky, hyper self contrasted boldly with her sullen, withdrawn, cautious self. Everyone always knew when EvilKitty was bothered by something. Aardvark, on the other hand, could hide anything for forever if she didn't want anyone to know, and no one would ever be the wiser.

"Dare I pry?" Aardvark asked.

Kitty sat straight, and breathed out. "I don't want to… but you've a right."

She turned, to face her squarely. "Do I now?" Aardvark asked, suddenly more interested. "Why is this?"

"I shouldn't have called you that… in front of everybody." Kitty mumbled, looking down.

Aardvark lifted her head with her false hand, so their gazes met. "Kitty, even if you don't, I understand how your fractured mind works. If you'd meant any ill to me you would have said it to me, and not to him. No, it wasn't right. Coming from anyone else… I'd probably remove them from the gene pool for such an insult."

Kitty's features drew up into a combination of worry and hurt she wasn't sure how to express. "I didn't mean it…"

Aardvark shook her head. "Yes you did. You don't think about things in such a manner to be able to utter something you don't mean. Not like that. You say what's on your mind. He was using me as a shield, and you took it from him. That was commendable, as he had no right to hide behind me, but your methods could have been revised a few times." She shrugged, and sat back. "Kitty, if there is anything about me you must know and understand, it is that I am not shallow. I understand why you said what you did."

Kitty looked down again.

"I forgive you, Kitty."

She looked up. "How?"

Aardvark grinned. "I don't pick apart things that don't need it, girl. You shouldn't either."

"Why?" Kitty pressed. "After everything else…"

"And you feel remorse for it, don't you? You're not beyond saving, Kitty, you're just a more rare kind of twisted nut than the rest of us, is all. Inside you're a good person. Now, just because it doesn't always show up…"

"You're insane!" Kitty accused.

"I never denied that." Aardvark replied, without losing a beat.

Kitty sputtered for a moment.

Aardvark grinned at her, and took back the metal knife. "I know who I am, Kitty. And in part, I know who you are, too. If you don't, then that's your problem. I admit I was a little shocked to hear from so many people that you'd said it at all, but I'm not mad at you."

Kitty blew a sigh.

"You can stop avoiding me. I'm not going to gut you."

"I was not avoiding you!" Kitty snapped, sitting straighter in her chair.

Aardvark laughed at her. "That a girl."

"… what?" Her expression turned puzzled, taken off guard by the odd comment. "What have you been _eating_…?"

Aardvark ran her eyes over the control board as she cleaned off the blade and slid it home into the inverted sheath on her breastplate, snapping the little holding tab closed over the flange between handle grip and blade. "We don't have a clue how many are out there, do we?" She asked, changing the subject mid-swing.

"No, our instruments are as good as theirs, under these conditions." Kitty offered, speculative.

"How much longer can we hold our position inside this radiation envelope before we have to run or risk integrity breach?"

Kitty shrugged. "That timer is also buggered up by the same singularity that's doing in all the rest of our onboard tech."

Aardvark gave her a look. "I meant best estimate from when you made calculations before settling here in the first place."

Kitty gave her a pensive look in response. "What calculations?"

Right then, something in the rear compartment groaned with a metal voice.

Aardvark frowned, and Kitty shrank back slightly, even as she reached for the flight controls. "Okay, okay."

Kitty flew the vessel towards the envelope's edge, dropping gears and shifting into a faster spin even as they reached the edge, curling around the dying star to slingshot around and shoot past the hole going fast enough to deny its graviton hunger, but as soon as they got out past the hole's influence and outside the radiation envelope, the first thing that happened was the little Mirratord scout vessel speared through nine decks of a Brute Heavy Cruiser, smashing through and out the other side through the hull back into open space, wearing more than a few shards and less than its blueprint's quantity of hull of its own.

"SHEEEEEEIT!" Kitty wailed, sounding much like a banshee might, her grips on the flight controls of the craft clamped down so hard her knuckles had bulged under her gloves, and she was in danger of imprinting her palms on the sticks. "Watch where you're driving, you hairy brainless beasts!" She called, even though the only one who could hear her was Aardvark.

"Goddess! Who taught you to fly??" The Zealot breathed, exhaling for the first time since the slingshot.

Kitty glanced over at her, tentative. "Um. Flyer did. Why?"

Aardvark's responding smile was feral when she looked over to meet Kitty's look. "I like it!"

Kitty felt the grin infect her own face, even as she turned back to see the controls before her. "Watch for the rest of them… I'm counting six. Wild party tonight."

"Lush." Aardvark accused.

Kitty just giggled.


	16. With Beaded Strings Attached

**Scene Two; **_**With Beaded Strings Attached**_

Imperial Admiral Aozora stood bent over a control console, frowning at it speculatively, pondering the meaning of the error message the primary function readout screen displayed. The ship he'd selected was not new, nor was it due for overhaul, so the malfunction happening somewhere down the lines of control to the varying functions on the craft was something unexpected.

Finally, he sat in the available chair before the aforementioned console, and tapped a key to see if it would change anything. The screen blanked, scrolling numerals too tiny to focus on individually but that his eye told him were numerals despite, and a new image popped up; this time, it appeared to be functioning properly.

At least there was that.

Having gotten himself aboard shy of being pincered in half by the closing doors, Ace had been the very last of the last additions to the crew aboard the _Inquisition of Purpose_, the Mirratord heavy cruiser Aozora had chosen for the mission. Chasing down two of his subordinates would not have required such intense firepower as the ship owned, had the mission not involved a small Brute armada. One ship against an unknown number of other ships likely of equal size at the least was not good odds when one was standing on the deck of a normal Covenant heavy cruiser.

Aozora was not on the deck of a normal heavy cruiser.

There were a few odd things about the _Inquisition of Purpose_ that would escape notice if not deliberately looked for, things that set her apart from the standard models of heavy cruisers. Though inwardly and outwardly appearing identical – for stealth reasons – the workings between the insides and the outsides were not the same at all.

Her engines were tri-fold, burning methyloxide in triennium tanks to stoke a heat reaction that was then dampened and condensed, allowing the heat excess through a series of feed lines taking it towards the nose of the ship. There, an unstable element was applied, and the resulting energetic chemical reaction was funneled back again – the length of the feed lines dampened the rush of pressure between the action and the engine, creating a calmer feed of fuel – where the engines that had started the process promptly consumed the volatile fuel mix, giving exhaust that was formed primarily of methyloxide. This meant the ship would never run out of go, but if it did, getting the fusion action started again – the engines' design practically demanded they be going already to be gotten started – would require more than any engineering crew was prepared to handle.

The system was not without its flaws, but it was far superior to the standard models the Covenant had used, allowing the ship to travel farther, faster, and since the heat generated was part of the process of fueling the thrust, overheating was never a problem. It was unlikely to get hotter than it was kept at anyway.

The primary cannon was also augmented, with a pair of secondaries at its flanks to head up any slack the main gun was liable to leave. This, considering, wasn't liable to be much at all. Aozora knew there were a few such vessels, but none of them had been used by the Covenant and when engaged to an enemy, it was always ensured no trace would ever come back to the SDs. Having a super dreadnaught in the first place, especially one that surpassed anything anyone else had in their armadas, was hard enough to keep secret.

True to standard Mirratord form, though, only Rage knew just how many there were, though it was an obvious guess that there could be no more than half a dozen at the most, as any more than that would be impossible to hide – ships refusing to engage in battles would come across as odd, especially if when finally moving at last to engage the enemy they tore holes in the science behind war. The _Inquisition of Purpose_'s shields alone were a marvel, a thing modeled after the Mirratord's member's own bodyshielding. If anything ever did get past it, though, the specialized armor sheathing on the body of the beast would surely stop the next volley.

She was a thing of beauty, but she wasn't wearing a mask so much as she was the mask, worn instead by those at her augmented helm. It made the error that much more curious to the Admiral, since the last place an error was liable to appear was on one of their precious SDs.

She wasn't liable to fail totally, though, with cutoffs between all stations so her network was precarious at best, keeping her compartments safe from one another. There was no one virus, no one breaching hit, no one single event that would cripple the _Inquisition_.

It would take so much more than that…

"Admiral! I had not expected to find you here…" A familiar voice broke Aozora's silent reverie, startling him into the realization he had, for the first time in more years than he could recall to count, let himself slip, and the owner of that voice had entered the room without his notice.

Aozora looked up at the intruder, feeling mixed at best… it had been too long, and he wasn't sure how he ought to feel about that personal error. To Steel, though, he just looked puzzled.

"Admiral?" Steel asked, concerned.

"It's nothing." Aozora looked back down, at the properly functioning console.

"Flyer has us in-system, sir." The Spartan soldier told him. "He wanted to know if you would prefer to be at the Command Deck when we made geo-synchrony."

Aozora gave that some thought before answering. "Yes." He stood, and when Steel headed out, he followed the Spartan through the door and up the corridor. The forested moon shone through the front viewer like a green and white beacon in a sea of angry black filled with twinkling white insects, each poised to sting at the slightest disturbance. It appeared peaceful, almost tranquil, but the debris in orbit around it suggested otherwise.

"Admiral, are you alright?" Flyer asked, able to see the Admiral's reflection against the image. "You look drawn."

Aozora scowled. "There is more to this image than it deems to betray. Give me readings, Flyer, what am I looking at?"

Flyer shrank a little, before drumming his fingers across multiple controls all the while never letting the steering go. "Uh, multiple contacts on the radar, the debris are concurrent with one standard light cruiser, the moon itself has over a hundred Forerunner installations on it, aaaaaand…"

"Finish your report, Flyer." Aozora beckoned. "There's more."

"Surface appears quiet." Flyer shrugged. "I'm sorry, Admiral, there isn't anything else. I'm not getting anything to indicate anyone ever went down there."

"No, there is something else. I am certain of it." Aozora insisted.

"What is it, Admiral?" Steel asked, gently so as not to incite the officer's sudden mood.

"How many contacts and of what caliber?" Aozora asked.

"Four, one light cruiser, two heavy cruisers and one line-breaker. They're on approach vectors."

"Approach?" Steel asked. "We're well within firing range."

"You see?" Aozora said, coolly. "My senses do not betray me."

"Orders, sir?"

"Have the beta squadron deploy, and harass their flanks. Curious behavior warrants investigation, no?"

"Yes, sir. Beta squadron deploying aye."

Steel just shook his head. As the seraph fightercraft zipped forward and into the range of the view of the vessels all clamoring for what appeared to be dibs on who got to ram the nose of the _Inquisitor_ first, he began to wonder anew how the Admiral's mind worked, if indeed it did any such thing. While outwardly sane and composed, more often cool and calm under pressure, it appeared that some other circumstance had him on a hair thin wire, this time, and now he wanted to play roulette. It would be a dangerous game indeed if he didn't get past whatever it was that was bothering him.

When the entirety of the efforts of beta squadron were ignored, the Admiral frowned pensively at the incoming ships. "Shoot them out of their positions in the sky." He commanded. "Something is very wrong with those vessels…"

If he'd had more words, they never came out. Steel's eyes grew wide when he saw the fore vessel suddenly erupt, spitting gobs of what appeared to be smoothed, lumpy asteroids out the nose of the ship. These in turn hurled towards the _Inquisition_ with an unmatched speed and force, but as each slammed harmlessly against the shielding shy of the hull, they all displayed their purpose when not one cracked or burst. Seeing this failure, the other ships opened fire, their main guns blazing away, the plasma charged rounds sizzling and crackling across the zero-point field a hundred meters from the surface of the hull.

"Flood." Aozora said. It sounded more like an aloud thought than a revelation. "I should have known."

"Sir, if I may." Steel asked.

"What is it, Steel?"

"You _did_ know, sir, you're the only one who's been thinking out loud for this whole conversation. Do we recall beta squadron?" Steel told him.

"Flyer, tell the fighters to return to our aft – I don't want to blink the shields under that barrage no matter how well our ship's armor is built. Personally I rather like her paint job."

"Yes, sir. Redeploying aye." Flyer echoed. The image rose as the viewing mechanism dipped with the nose of the _Inquisition of Purpose_, the ace crack pilot swinging into action. Outside, the enormous ship began her turning dance, causing much of the enemy fire to fall shy or overshoot. Despite this, though, the tactical officer was still able to keep the guns sighted in response and the fight was sent back at the Flood controlled vessels.

The light cruiser tried to dodge out of the fight, as if sensing it had nothing in accordance to what it would take to survive a direct hit from the Mirratord's main gun, but in doing so it opened its flank wide, and as a result took a round there from the left secondary. Shielding flared and died, hull boiled away, atmosphere ignited. After a second hit, more of the hull was ripped off, and sent spinning into the rest of the debris field. Spontaneous chain reactions began erupting across pressure points throughout the ship as the heat boiled through the frame. As the _Inquisition_ hurtled past, the light cruiser drifted, and died. While the Flood vessels pounded out plasmoid rounds from smaller turrets while their own main cannons cooled and rebuilt energy, the Mirratord vessel warmed another shot, the two smaller cannons doing so at a better rate than the big, main one.

The plasma sizzled across the undaunted shielding of the augmented vessel, and even as the final warm-up stage occurred in the rearmost Flood vessel's gun, the foremost one punted off more of the Flood stones, aiming to punch one through the hull somewhere, anywhere, as long as it went in.

The parasite wanted that ship – and wanted her badly enough to kill her to get their hands on her. The match was unevenly cast, though, and the line-breaker burst down the middle as the main cannon's round ripped through it, sending shards of hull spinning away at dangerous speeds while much of the rest boiled into vapor and dispersed into the vacuum as a gas. Catching the last of the tail of that killing round, the ship beside the line-breaker, one of the heavy cruisers, lit up like a lighting mechanism as its shields flared in protest of the glancing blow. A half-weight round from one of the smaller cannons made a direct hit as the round out of the other sizzled past the neck of the other heavy cruiser, having been dodged.

Nosing the last of the debris from the line-breaker out of the way, the second heavy cruiser sped up, firing the MAC round at an accelerated speed, and slamming it hard into the _Inquisition_'s shields with more force than the shot was made to go. The result was a slight ripple running through the energy sheath, but the shield itself still refused to break.

The next time the cannons went off, the Mirratord vessel's main cannon round slammed hard square into one of the heavy cruiser's shots, killing both rounds and causing a sensor-blinding reaction as the two destroyed one another. For a moment, neither could see the other, but in that moment, Flyer had gotten the _Inquisition_ around another impossible turn and was barreling down on the pair, ducking through the excess of debris and the sizzling anomaly that was slowly fading from the head-on collision of the pair of MAC rounds.

The two Flood-controlled heavy-cruisers didn't have time to react at all as both of the secondaries lit off on one and the main lit on the other, the one punching through and breaking the cruiser in half, and the pair shearing off the top half of the other. Micro-collisions of the fusion inside the accelerator rounds with the enginery in the crippled survivor caused a chain reaction that blew it the rest of the way to hell.

"Admiral, didn't Ace say Kitty told him there was a _Brute_ armada chasing her, not a Flood one?" Flyer mused aloud, as he brought the Mirratord cruiser to a standstill so they could more easily collect their dispatched fighter squadron.

"It's my understanding." Aozora answered.

"That's what I heard, too." Steel put in. "Where did that infestation come from?"

"The planet below, Steel, the planet below." Aozora told him, before turning and walking off the Command Deck.

After watching him leave, and seeing the door slide closed behind him, Steel looked over at Flyer. "What is it that has the Admiral so wired?" he asked.

"Might be because he hasn't heard back from his mate since she left to find the same girls we're out here looking for."

"What?" Steel asked.

"Yeah, she took a stealth slider and went on her own. I believe she had his blessing, but at this point… the Flood and all… I'd be a little concerned about that communications gap, too. This is a long ways from home with a hell of a lot of enemy to think about."

"The same could be said for EvilKitty and Aardvark." Steel said.

"Yes, but while the Admiral cares deeply for both of those, Kuro is the only one he's in love with." Flyer pointed out. "People get funny about that sort of thing."

"Level her off, Flyer… I want to investigate the surface to find out if there is anything to indicate where either the Brutes or those girls went from here."

"Sure thing, Steel."

Shaking his head again, Steel turned and followed the Admiral's path out. He caught up in time to meet with both the Admiral and Acetylcholine in the corridor shy of the bay where the dispatched wings of fightercraft were being funneled back in. Entering the bay, Ace looked up at the settling fighters, and made a mental head-count. No one had been shot down, but there was an odd number despite this.

"Steel, are you seeing what I'm seeing?" Ace asked, scratching his head in puzzlement.

"Yeah, I count one… _extra_?? Why is there more than we had before?"

"Easy." Aozora told them, standing at ease. "We have a newcomer."

"Sir?" Steel asked.

"Find out which one it is and shoot it down." He instructed. "I am not going to hand my ship to the Flood no matter how desperate they are."

"Yes, sir." Steel began by sealing each bay pod so none of the pilots could leave their ships until he let them, but even as he did so, the last few to come in had not been locked in to a pod yet. Ace stepped over to a weapons' locker on the wall inside the bay and opened it, pulling out a fuel rod cannon and shoving some ammunition down through the top-loading chamber. He turned around right as the next-to-last seraph suddenly nosed into the last one, dipping up from its pod right before it would have engaged to it and been locked in. "That one?" He pointed at the attacking seraph.

"Not that one." Ace said, as the one forced the other into the wall. "That one is seven two R five… Maestro's bird."

"Maestro can fly a bird?" Steel asked, as the first five rods sizzled out across the open air of the bay towards the pinned seraph that was jetting back and forth on the rocket boosters trying to work free.

"He can now." Ace answered, reloading as he watched the rods make contact, and peel up hull. "It's a little something I installed when I rebuilt him."

"Oh, hell, don't go there again." Steel sighed, wiping a hand over his golden visor. Aozora smiled slightly when a puff of green erupted out of the flames gouting from the beleaguered seraph. It whined up and blew a large fireball, then crunched in half and headed for the floor.

Maestro's bird drifted clear, so Ace shouldered the cannon and put another magazine load into the fallen wreckage. Something tore free of the inside, flailed uselessly under burning fuel and molten metal, then collapsed shy of the deck floor, consumed by the flames even as the last rod slammed into the ruined seraph and reduced the last of the recognizable hull into sludge. Steel shook his head and walked away.

"Welcome to the _Inquisition of Purpose._" Ace told the fallen Flood seraph. "That's how we at the Mirratord say hello."

Aozora turned, and walked back out the door.


	17. Scrollworked Metal

**Scene Three; **_**Scroll-worked Metal**_

Kitty had one hand on the puncture, the other digging through a supply pack behind her. The contortion of physiology on her part was made possible only in that the supply pack had been close enough to pull it off. Aardvark wasn't helping her with the attempt at a patch job because she was also holding a hole closed, on the opposite side of the ship. She could feel the synthetic-fiber weave material of her combat suit glove beginning to pull, and frowned at the back of her hand. It was hard to multitask when both sides required equally vital attention; let go of the holes in their ship, and have all their air sucked out through them, but to get them sealed with something besides their hands required they find the sealant injectors in a timely manner.

This proved the hard part. Kitty hadn't loaded the ship, and had never suffered multiple punctures before… the first one was usually the only one, and it was always easy enough to seal up with a wad of crystallized engine lube. In this case, though, the damage to the exterior was extensive enough that a field expedient simply wasn't going to be enough.

And the gods-be-damned sealant seemed nowhere to be found. Finally, Aardvark heaved a sigh at her fellow Mirratord and grumbled something under her breath, letting her free hand hang limp at her side.

Kitty looked over at her, curiously. "What's the matter, Aardvark?"

"Frustrated, that's all." She answered. "Not one much for resignation… this heap of detritus just wasn't designed to be a penetrator dart, I guess."

Kitty just nodded, looking at the back of her own hand, pondering the curious pulling feeling on her palm. There wasn't going to be a perfect seal with something as porous as fabric and skin covering the hole, and if either of them held them covered for long enough, neither would have much in the way of meat on their hands at all. Air was still escaping, just at a negligible enough rate to allow their attentions to wander to other, more pressing matters… such as locating the hull sealant.

Aardvark squinted down into the contents of the supplies scattered randomly in the box between them, before looking up and over at the controls in front of the pilot's seat right as the comn indicator chimed at them. "I'm not that stretchy." She mused.

"Neither am I." Kitty agreed. "But even if it's some Brute offering us surrender… hey, I'd face a million enemy without weapons of my own at all any day of the week, if my only other choice was to sit in this heap and suffocate."

Aardvark looked over at her. "But how could they have found us?"

"I don't know… don't care. One of us has got to answer that comn, though, before both of us dies."

Aardvark looked at the hand she had on the wall, then over where Kitty's hand was put, then tried to span the distance. Her fingertips brushed the back of Kitty's hand, but went no farther. She growled. "You try."

"But I'm shorter than you!" Kitty protested, before trying it anyway. Her fingers, exactly, did the same thing. Aardvark grumbled something else that wasn't understandable. She dug into the repair kit again, as the comn chimed once more, the automated noise sounding impatient, at best. Grabbing the first thing that had a soft grip on the handle, she used her teeth to tear that off, and uncovered the hole behind her hand long enough to slap the handle-grip cover over it, losing only a gasp of their remaining air in the exchange.

Leaving it to hold itself there by suction, Aardvark jumped towards the controls, and slid back into the seat before them. She keyed the channel open, and listened.

_"I repeat, this is Darkness calling Wicked Anteater, do you copy, over."_

Aardvark cast Kitty a grin. "What a twist, huh?"

Kitty snarled in reply, having been forced to span the distance as best as she could between the bulkheads anyway when the handle grip had begun to worm out through the hole. "Just answer the damn message!"

Aardvark touched the control to send what she spoke; "Darkness, this is Wicked Anteater, we hear you, over."

_"That's a relief. Is that you, floating derelict there?"_

Aardvark sighed, and pushed the button again. "Yeah, it kind of is. We… ran into some trouble." She cast Kitty another look. The words were meant with dual definition… something Aardvark was rather renowned for.

_"I see. Has the Admiral contacted you? Have you seen them?"_ Darkness asked.

"Negative contact, Darkness. We have high priority package onboard, with critical equipment failure. Is there a way to get over to your ship? Please tell me you have your own ship…" Aardvark pleaded.

_"No, I came in a bath pool. Of course I have a ship around me! What do you think I am, a leviathan? Your dock ring looks intact – if Acetylcholine was here he could rig the shielding to repel vacuum and hold air, and you could just jump across once I had you inside my envelope, but he isn't. He's on the ship with the others… who are all looking for you two, by the way."_

"Good to hear… How many?" Aardvark asked, watching on the half-functioning monitor as another vessel neared their back hatch. If contact was made wrong, the ship she and Kitty were on would only get nudged away, since they weren't firing any countermeasure rockets on their nose to aid in the endeavor. Not that they could; those had ceased function some hours back along with their shielding mechanism. Apparently ramming through a cruiser was hard on the shield's emitters.

_"That I know of, one of our cruisers. I've been tracking ion signatures for the better part of three weeks, now. I was about to start questioning my tracing capabilities when I finally caught up to you."_

"Never doubt your exceptional senses, Darkness… they are the only things that can never fail you." Aardvark advised, feeling the slight jolt in the battered ship's frame as the other one made perfect contact on the first try. They both looked over when the hissing of pressure between the doors caused a blowout in their own hatch door, and the torn metal formed an obtuse triangle.

"Well, that was good enough timing, I suppose." Kuro said, waving a leg at it. It was just out of reach. "I don't think I could have covered that one."

Aardvark just laughed at her, walking over and taking over the one hole's maintenance so Kitty could relax for a breath as the hatches both slid open. Kuro looked up at them from the other side.

"Wow, you look good." She marveled.

"Funny." Aardvark answered, cocking her head. "Don't feel good." She cast the handle-grip a glance, and let it go, before striding forward off the dead ship onto the other. The first thing she did once there, though, was wrap Kuro in a hug.

"Good to see you, Aardvark." Kuro offered, returning the rare expression of actual emotion.

"Good to be seen." She answered, smiling. "Come on, Kitty." She waved her forward. When Kitty let go of the puncture, it began a high whining hiss, leaking air at the speed of a small jet's propulsion, but she had walked the span of the deck to Kuro's vessel and the hatch was closed before more than a minute's worth of air had escaped.

"What's the package, by the way?" Kuro asked.

"A Halo Index." Aardvark said. "The Brutes want it pretty badly… apparently they are hard to come by… Flood must be hoarding them."

Kuro gave a weak smile at the lame joke. "Sure. Well, get strapped in, I had a couple of blips on my screens when I got here, so I don't expect they will have left considering I laid into the radio for better than an hour."

"We only got the signal a few minutes ago." Kitty protested, taking a seat and settling in it. "Were you out of range or something?"

"Yeah, more or less. Had to grope blindly because you'd drifted quite a ways after your ion emissions trail had ended." Kuro answered, sitting back down in the pilot's chair and taking the controls in hand as Aardvark found a place in the copilot's chair beside her. "I've been out of contact with the rest of the Mirratord for some time now."

"I thought you said there were others looking for us… you're not staying in communications range?" Aardvark asked.

"No, I set out before they did, because I only took…" She waved at their surroundings, "and they have one of our SDs."

"They authorized that?" Kitty exclaimed. "For me? Wow…"

"More likely for the Index, Kitty." Aardvark told her, popping her bubble and making her frown. "One missing Mirratord isn't going to make the rest of us scramble our greatest armaments… now, an Index in danger of falling into the hands of the Brute's armada… now that would warrant such a reaction."

"Just shut up a moment and let me fantasize, will you?" Kitty argued. "Girl's got to get her kicks somewhere."

"You get kicks out of _everything_, Kitty!" Aardvark complained. "Do you live on them, or something?"

She only sighed. A mumbled, "No" came out later, as Kuro disengaged the seal and clamps holding them to their dead vessel. Doubtless now there was no air in there anymore, the breaches leaking everything with enthusiasm. Once they were loose, the derelict vessel was allowed to do as it might, left to drift, as Kuro steered them back the way she had come, aiming to return home, and slip past the Brute armada pursuing the Index.

For the first hour nothing happened, nothing showed up, no one spoke, but right when the girls all thought they were home free, said armada showed up. The first strafing rounds that streaked past their noses made the front view boil on the outside, and Kuro was forced into a more erratic, and faster, flight pattern to keep from getting cooked out of the sky. Heat rippled through their small craft, making all three of them sweat, but they were never hit square, Kuro's piloting skills sufficient enough to deny their antagonist's aim.

Finally, blocked and herded, there was no other way out of the mess save one, and she kicked the propulsion down into the highest gear before shooting out through the narrowing gap between the bullets and the ships, running for the lack of any ability to put up an effective fight against five cruisers with one little seraph.

Fleets of fighters poured out of the bays on the cruisers, pursuing them as their mother ships did, peppering them with rounds of plasma. Aardvark looked over the controls, the displays, then the weapons array. "We're going to get drilled out the back if we don't come up with something to dissuade them from shooting at us like this." She mused, aloud.

"I have an idea… it's risky…" Kitty offered, tentative.

"Yeah, Kitty, what?" Aardvark looked back at her, and she held up a device that looked a lot like a plasma grenade, save it had a flat side, and an embedded LED at the apex of the round side. There was also no obvious detonator switch. "Okay, what is that?"

"Something Ace made… he was having me test them and take readings. It's my last one. I saved it for a special occasion because he only made so many."

"But what is it?"

"I don't know… some sort of thingy that causes space to react with a spontaneous and temporary singularity… they last all of thirty seconds, just long enough to swallow whatever they're next to."

"You have that thing on _this_ ship??" Kuro shrieked.

"It's not active." Kitty defended. "If you can get me into one of their cruisers…"

"Whoa, whoa, sister, slow down. _Into_?" Aardvark asked. "Kitty, we're currently doing our best to get _away_ from those cruisers. How do you expect us to survive that?"

"Easy…" She shrugged. "Or, maybe not easy, but simple enough. I can change out my helmet for a ranger, strap myself to the hull and wait until Kuro here shoots past one of their bays… if I spot one that's open, I'll fling this little babe inside, and when I get back in here and we get some distance between us and said crusier, I just…" she pulled a detonator switch from her belt, and held it up, "pow. End of cruiser. Sound so hard?"

"Sounds like Kitty wants to commit suicide. What if we get strafed while you're outside?" Aardvark demanded.

"Hey, it's our only cruiser-killer. Do you wanna use it or what?" Kitty countered.

Aardvark snatched it from her. "You're not going out there."

She sighed. "Fine, whatever…"

"Kuro, give me a crazy ivan." Aardvark instructed, before getting up suddenly and striding to the back, where she pulled an airtight helmet from the supply rack.

"Hey! Wait just a minute, here!" Kitty protested, jumping to her own hooves. "_You're_ going to do it?? Are you _insane_?"

"I trust my aim." Aardvark said. "What I don't trust is that the enemy would be so kind as to let _you_ back inside in one piece."

"You can't do this!" Kitty insisted. "Kuro, tell her!"

"She is the highest ranking Mirratord officer aboard, Kitty." Kuro answered. "You're not going to win that argument."

"Like hell I'm not!" Kitty turned back around to face Aardvark again, just in time to get hit across the head by a metal fist. She smacked into the decking and stayed there, unconscious.

"I don't ask permission." Aardvark told her. "But I will ask forgiveness… that, however, will wait until I get back and you wake up." She sealed the helmet down, and took her first breath of canned air. She first ejected the insertion pod from the launch tube, causing more than five of the pursuing seraphs to suddenly dive after it, assuming it had someone in it, and blasting it to smithereens.

When the tube was clear, Aardvark closed it again, stepped in, and sealed the inner doors. She fed the air in it with her back into the cabin, and slipping out slowly, she crawled across the hull for the span of a step before activating her camouflage. Once she was completely invisible, she moved over to the nearest dock clamp lock bar, and clipped a cable on her harness to it. The stars spun and streaked in her vision, lines of shooting plasma bolts searing past as Kuro flew the seraph around in tight maneuvers, ducking and dodging the oncoming Brute fighters. The nearest cruiser was coming up, looming huge against the black and green star-flecked sky, the vacuum of space surrendering a feel more of utter and total silent chaos than any calm, tranquil serenity one might sense if one was ground-bound, such as on a planet somewhere.

Having been in many a battle, Aardvark was unaccustomed to the total silence of the tangled picture before her, the view rotating at base point as much as it turned independent of Kuro's moves.

Still, she focused on her mission, and braced against the hull for a moment as the cruiser zipped past close enough to touch. If Kuro scoured the seraph across the cruiser, there would be nothing left of Aardvark. But the Imperial Admiral's mate seemed to have an innate feel of where her hull was, and she maintained a six-foot gap as she sailed along the length of the ship she was beside. Much of the plasma fire aimed at them slapped against the cruiser, instead, though sometimes little droplets of plasma spray would sprinkle across their hull, mainly harmless. The biggest one had swept away some paint, but left the hull itself undamaged under the relentless cold of space.

A shot of plasma was big enough and fast enough to maintain damage for a goodly span… but a droplet no bigger than the end of one of Aardvark's thumbs had no more conviction than an equal amount of water, so separated from the bulk of the heat's source. Aardvark jumped against the end of her tether when Kuro suddenly banked, and rolled across the top of the seraph until she had tangled in the cable. Coughing at the suddenness of the action, Aardvark kicked until she had unrolled again, and got her arms free. Once the cable was back out of the way, she looked up at the cruiser, noting the filament-thin sliver of luminescent blue that betrayed the presence of bay doors.

Possibly, one of them was open. Her hand went to the singularity grenade at her hip, and detached it from the clip there. If she lost it, she knew she'd never find it again, meaning once she let it go it was totally committed and so was she to that trajectory. She mumbled prayer to a forgotten Goddess for quality of aim, realizing for the first time that Kuro was not – could not – slow down enough to give her a fair shot.

The seraph banked out. Aardvark clung, desperate not to lose the device Kitty had procured, hugging it to her armored chest like some helpless babe being shielded from bullet-spray. When the motion was completed, they suddenly spun out and shot straight back the way they had come. When Aardvark looked up again, she realized they were aimed straight for one of the bay doors… but she could pick any one she wanted.

A tentative, half-feral smile crept over her features, her mandibles flexing behind the airtight ranger helmet. She raised her arm, and jumped to her hooves right as she felt they reached the last possible stretch, and slung the singularity grenade straight at the second bay shield from the left, the barrier winking out just long enough to permit the passage of another wing of Brute fighters. As they came out, the device sailed in… Aardvark watched it, holding her breath and refusing to allow thought to happen as she committed all her concentration to that one, small, fading object. When the shield door winked back on, there was no sign of the device at all, leaving it either on target or hopelessly off, but all they could do now was escape it. Aardvark sank to her knees and crept back to the drop pod chute, pulling herself in right before Kuro had to make another of those accursed turns. Aardvark watched with muted disdain as her form slowly wavered back into view, but there was no helping it; it was time to get back inside.

How she loved inertial dampeners! Aardvark sealed the chute and let it pressurize before she stepped through the doors onto the decking. Kitty was still on the floor, still out cold. Aardvark worked the helmet off, and replaced it with her own, the scroll-worked metal of the thing complimenting her shiny black attire.

"Get us out of here, Kuro." Aardvark instructed, stepping past Kitty's crumpled form towards the copilot's seat. "I don't know how much distance we need."

"Why don't you ask Kitty?" Kuro asked, through her teeth.

"She's otherwise occupied." Aardvark mentioned, strapping down. She looked at the detonator switch she'd lifted from her sister Mirratord, and sighed. "This had better work."

"You're a damn fool." Kuro muttered, turning the seraph around and under one of the farther cruisers before jetting for distance from all of them. The angry cloud of insect-like Brute fighter-craft followed, still pounding out ammo.

"I was born one of those." Aardvark told her, before pressing the switch.

The second cruiser from the center of the battle-cluster bulged weirdly, and compressed inward, the cruiser directly beside it crumpling also as it fell inward towards the dying ship at its flank. The next nearest vessel, a standard span plus the second cruiser's distance away, suddenly bent in the middle like a banana, before the sparkling epicenter of the first two's demise popped with a spectacular bang, and settled into the area as glittering space-dust. Shaken, the other cruisers could only scramble to rewire their ruined equipment. Their two lost and one utterly useless companions would never go anywhere, ever again.

Towards the outside of the cluster, the Brute fighters drew up, the pilots calling frantically for some kind of feedback from the suddenly missing ships… there wasn't even any notable debris, and the one damaged ship that did remain hadn't lost a single flake of hull paint. The vessel was simply reshaped, as if warmed at the forge and bent a little, gently, so no cracks would occur. Outwardly none of the survivors appeared to be harmed in any way, save the banana-shaped cruiser.

But inwardly, the entire cluster was electronically dead, and radiologically dark.


	18. Identical Sins

**Scene Four; **_**Identical Sins**_

Imperial Admiral Aozora Raiganimee had seen bigger armadas in his day. The problem with that detail was how said armada had been on his side of the war at the time. Now, though, his was a fleet of one, and he was facing questionable odds. While nothing was damaged enough to warrant concern, pitting a single super-dreadnaught against that many carriers and cruisers was just not a sound tactical plan. He felt he would have been happier if he'd had another couple of the super-dreadnaughts…

Fifty total, the Brute armada seemed small in the distance, but one at a time and in pairs also, the vessels were turning on their internal axis, and would all face the new arrival squarely soon enough. Plunging into their ranks at all, regardless where any of them were facing, though, would be a bad idea.

"Orders, sir?" Flyer asked.

"Give me a moment, Flyer." Aozora muttered, thumbing one of his mandibles as he tried to make sense of the Brute's distribution. They seemed drifted, scattered… like as one they had all shut down their reactors and allowed themselves to drift in whatever galactic current was available. Better, that this seemed to have been an acceptable pursuit for several hours. Some were hopelessly far from the formation, others too close together, and he suspected when he saw a pair of them flare madly that their proximity had just closed up, and they had bumped shields.

Not the healthiest thing to do when one needed that shield integrity to face down something as powerful as the _Inquisition of Purpose_. "Sir, weapons charging." Flyer reported. "Some of them have us locked on target."

"Open the cannon doors and warm our MACs. Something isn't quite right here…" he suddenly squinted at the image he was looking at. "What the hell…?"

"Sir?" Folded Steel asked, turning around to investigate the exclamation. He looked the display over, seeing nothing apart from the obvious strangeness in the formation, until a moment later, Aozora raised a finger, and pointed.

The Spartan emitted a kind of strangled noise of startled denial at what his eyes were seeing. "Holy crap, Admiral… what is that?"

"It looks for all the world like a normal cruiser, Steel." Aozora said, noting details on the craft. "But it's bent… like some kind of curled fighting knife."

"Looks like a big, purple banana." Steel marveled. "What in hell is it for?"

"We're about to find out." Aozora decided. "Flyer, give me as much information as you can get on that fleet out there, I need to know exactly what I'm facing… and why this strange ship is so confidant as to just sit there idle while the others rise to fight us."

"Yes, sir." Flyer agreed, his fingers flying over the array of controls. Steel stepped over behind him, at first watching the quickness of his handling, then lifted his gaze to see the display monitors above the console, and to watch the information displayed on each.

He gestured at one. "Admiral, that bent ship just nosed."

"I see it." Aozora mused, still watching his own screens. "Do you suppose it could be broken? It looks like it's still… drifting."

"Yes, sir, that's a viable possibility." Steel agreed. "First salvo away, three thousand kilometers and closing."

"Fools to think they made a meaningful shot at that kind of range." Flyer muttered, sounding disappointed in his enemy.

"Under normal circumstances, it would not have been a waste of munitions, Flyer, try to keep that in mind – outwardly we look like a normal Covenant heavy cruiser. They don't have the kind of thruster placements we do that allow half your piloting skills to apply."

Flyer didn't answer.

Steel turned partway, to look back at the Sangheili watching the console there. "Admiral?"

"Fire off the first rounds to break them up, then get us in closer to apply a little damage." He decided, at last. "I still don't like this. Every time I turn around something else is missing."

"Salvo away, aye." Flyer echoed. "Coming up on the two thousand kilometer mark."

"Ease up on her, Flyer, you don't want to show all your hand at once." Steel advised, under his breath. He placed one armored hand on the SPI trooper's shoulder, his golden visor reflecting the screens before him. If there was any inhibition, any hesitance, in the Spartan, it didn't show. He knew the odds of their surviving this armada as well as they had done for the first were slim; but there was no escaping them now. Though quick on her feet in sub-light speeds, she could only zip through slipspace at the same rate as these others.

Evasion ceased to be an option the instant the enemy was presented to them. But the battle was going to be brutal. The _Inquisition_'s halls rumbled with the sound of plasma mortars hitting her shield wall, but for the moment, nothing else changed. Steel's eyes darted from readout to readout, but though he itched to move, to deliver some action of his own, he remained rooted where he stood, minding his time.

"Fighters have deployed from the enemy ships, Admiral." Flyer reported, his tone neutral to the Sangheili, but Steel detected the SPI trooper's mild frustration that his ship had been hit at all. He was a good pilot – their best. But the _Inquisition _didn't have pitch, roll and yaw quite like what he would have preferred, and she moved slow and cumbersome not unlike her non-augmented counterparts. She held more power, could do more, but she just couldn't spin and fly with as much speed and grace to fully evade everything ever thrown at her.

In Flyer's personal craft, the armor and shielding were practically useless items in that he never allowed either to do their jobs. "Acknowledged." Aozora's voice responded. "Level at zero three zero by zero nine six and come about."

"Zero three zero by zero nine six, aye." Flyer muttered. "Why there…?" The last part came out so low even Steel almost missed the query, but he also didn't answer it… he didn't know and couldn't guess. The Admiral probably had something up his sleeve.

"Approaching at vectors zero one one by zero nine six and send the signal to ready our own fighters." Aozora instructed. "After they launch I want you back where you started, understood?"

"Aye sir." Flyer answered.

Steel looked back over his shoulder at the Admiral, quizzically, but said nothing.

As the Mirratord vessel _Inquisition of Purpose_ barreled in at the Brute fleet, she spun slightly above them and to the left, where through the crackling MAC and plasma fire her onboard fighter compliment suddenly sprayed away from her hull, intercepting the Brute fighter craft and penetrating the formation. When the fighters were out, the _Inquisition of Purpose_ turned back, darting between the other cruisers and hitting the farthest vessel from where she had shedded all her fighters. The Brute cruiser cratered at the impact point, blowing out all the decks amidships and spewing atmospheric fire through the cracks generated in the hull along the injury. A half heartbeat later, the main reactor blew, causing the center to bulge outward before the rest of the vessel caught the shock and shattered.

The Brute armada was scattered too far to aid one another much, but some of them were close enough to put up a worthwhile fight. Flyer nosed the ship through the sparkling remains of the first kill, spreading them out of the way to strike at the next, streaking lines of lancing plasma leaving dull grey scars in the space they had crossed. The Brute ship didn't have the time or room to evade the barrage, but while it somehow survived with no shielding, a broken, smoking hull, and one dead engine thruster, it was able to get off it's own shot before it was hit, and at the conclusion of the warm-up following damage, it spat another.

"Shit!" Flyer exclaimed. "How'd they cool that gun so fast??"

The _Inquisition of Purpose_ rolled yaw and dipped beneath the first round, the ionization trail streaking practically inches over her shield wall, but the second round slammed square into the neck of the ship, sending ripples of distortion through the shielding that reached her aft. From the side, two of the other ships had come about successfully, and even as a wing of fighters stitched fire down one side of one of them, they both combined their fire to smack the _Inquisition_ in the back as well.

The Mirratord ship's shields flared brightly, refusing steadfastly to fail even as she launched a second shot at the offending survivor and then spun as she lifted her position before it could hit. Turning to address the second pair, she found more of the others had regained their positions and while one was still taking potshots at the fighter craft, all the others – forty eight ships total – all combined their effort to take the _Inquisition of Purpose_ out of the sky.

Fifteen lancing rounds slammed into her shielding, the rest evaded successfully, but even as she rained hell upon two of the forty eight at once, blowing one completely away and crippling the other so it could not fight, her formerly seeming impenetrable shielding fizzled, holes stitching through the energy barrier. The next round tore the failing shielding away, opening her shining hull to catch the next twenty-two hits, each boring holes and craters in the hardened ablative coating to expose bare metal sheathing beneath. The pounding redirected part of the ship's flight path, but even as metal vapor poured from the wounds like smoke, the _Inquisition of Purpose_ came about for another round. The main batteries focused on one heavy cruiser and burned holes through it until it exploded upon a comrade, splintering shrapnel raining across the hulls of more than a few of the others, but only damaging one of them noticeably. The secondaries divided to take two other ships, one of them parting down the middle as if sliced by a hot knife, the other's fore snapping off at the neck, following the detonation of the central mass.

The Brutes' next volley was from a bare forty vessels, the fighter compliment stealing the attention away from the other three of the original forty eight, but this time only one of them missed, as the others had somehow quickly learned to compensate for Flyer's dodging maneuver.

Thirty-nine spiraling rounds of massive plasma streaked through the cold of space, and slammed hard and deep into the exposed hull of the _Inquisition of Purpose_. Her port engine stuttered, the brilliant red glow flashing like a warning light before it ultimately went out. Hull peeled away, burned off as vapor or shredding away under the shock of impact, the stout armor caving and tearing apart like plastic film. The fortieth round sizzled past the starboard side, raking past just near enough to boil the hull, clawing away several meters of metal in a long stripe and turning it into vapor as it went past.

The return volley from the super-dreadnaught was lethargic and anemic, compared to the initial salvo, but the _Inquisition of Purpose_ still managed to punt four more of the vessels out of commission before staring down the muzzles of more than thirty-six guns. The Mirratord vessel could nolonger spin and dance like she used to, pounding out bullets and missiles and MAC rounds accompanied by the plasma cannons as fast as the bores would cool, all shielding gone and her armor badly damaged. The next salvo, even if all that struck were ten of the remaining thirty-six, would kill her. Dodging it was out of the question – not only was she far too close to the Brute fleet now, she was also less a thruster manifold, and the heat matrix that powered them was beginning to make her hull, or what remained of it, glow.

Despite how this appearance would have caused any outside observer to think she were fixing to rupture at her core and blow her own self apart, the Brutes waited not at all, and the next salvo – from thirty-five, now – sizzled as they streaked brightly for the dying Mirratord ship.

* * *

"Sitrep."

"Vectors heading nine nine five by seven three seven, speed steadied at three thousand kilometers an hour… approach cutoff in fifteen seconds."

"Open the cannon doors, Lieutenant." The words were spoken with a smug smile. "Let the guns get a good, long breath of deep space before we baptize those sons of bitches."

"Gun ports open, aye."

"ETA?"

"Five seconds, sir… four, three, two… and here we are, and HOLY SHIT!"

* * *

Imperial Admiral Aozora had only enough time to pick himself up, shoving the broken remains of a severed console's shattered countenance from his hips to rise, and look at the flickering screen to know his career was over. He had only enough time now to see if everyone else was already dead, if he would die alone.

He clawed to his hooves, and pressed a piece of the ceiling paneling aside, flipping it up and back to reveal what it might. In about thirty seconds the _Inquisition of Purpose_ was going to shred into micrometeorites, but he had to see… had to know.

Folded Steel lay half-curled on one side, but he looked up with one hand in the air when Aozora looked down at him. He'd been holding that panel up. "Steel?" He asked, before looking past the human warrior to see why the Spartan would have bothered. Aside that the armor around one thigh looked good enough to pick off of him and stab someone with, under his other elbow was Flyer; but while smashed beneath much of the console he'd been using a moment before the last salvo struck, the SPI trooper looked much more the worse for wear. Something was speared through the center of his chest armor, and through out the back, the broken metal shaft shining crimson in the flickering blue and violet lights. He didn't look responsive.

"Admiral." Steel sounded surprised, as he gathered Flyer from the floor and struggled to rise. "What do we do now?"

Aozora took his arm by the elbow and lifted him, but while usually raising a half-ton clad human would not have phased the Admiral, right then it made a previously unknown ache flare up in his back. He winced, but gave it no further thought. "We are about to die, Spartan. That deliverance is incoming as we speak." He inhaled slowly, then asked, "Flyer?"

Steel shook his head. "I think we could save him, sir… but his heart stopped. I have to get him to the medical bay quickly or resuscitation will be the least of his concerns." Though determined, the Spartan wavered where he stood, holding the SPI in both arms. Limping badly, he struggled towards the door, but when Aozora started to follow, instead he dropped unexpectedly, smacking his head off a surviving console and dizzying himself.

Dazed and for a moment confused where he was, Aozora rolled back over and shook his head, failing to understand why he'd fallen. The floor had neither shaken nor slipped from beneath his hooves, but there he sat, on the floor. Grumbling to himself for the stabbing ache in his kidneys, Aozora grappled the console to regain his feet, but had to lean heavily on it to stay there, watching as one Spartan carried the other out through a door that had to be pried open to permit passage.

He sighed, weary. "It was an honor to serve with such fine warriors…" He looked down at the console's control board, then up and over at the flickering displays, starting to smell the beginnings of an onboard fire. It was nowhere in sight at the moment, but the scent of smoke was clear. It smelled of burning electrical insulation.

The reaction to having an air-consuming flame aboard an already crippled ship died instantly as his eyes widened in shock and surprise at what was now on the display. "Forerunners be praised!" He cried, ecstatic. "High Councilor Lai Tasha." The words came out both awed and honored, and he crossed his free arm over his chest in salute to his comrade and friend.

Outside the _Inquisition of Purpose_, the vessel's sister-ship, the _Sovereign of Stars_, hung between her crippled sister and the enemy, their angry plasma rounds buzzing harmlessly over her augmented, and fully charged, shield wall. Her own guns blazed and thundered in retort, hurtling insult and injury upon the last of the Brute armada and blasting their partly damaged ships into shrapnel.

At the helm, High Councilor Lai Tasha stood staring in dismay at the wrecked heap that was the _Inquisition of Purpose_, allowing his bridge crew to attend the battle for the most part. They were competent… not the Mirratord's best, but they could handle this small party of Brutes without much incident. Unlike the _Inquisition of Purpose_, the _Sovereign of Stars_ hung still throughout the firefight, permitting blow after hammering blow to strike her rippling shields, holding her ground between the Brutes and her smoldering sister ship. If the _Sovereign_ moved at all, it would leave the _Inquisition_ unprotected, and open for destruction. Lai Tasha had no intention of allowing the best and topmost of his Mirratord to be so blindly crushed, well knowing what tonnage of wreckage had been left hanging when he'd arrived.

He'd expected a little trouble, but nothing on this scale. If the _Inquisition of Purpose_ never flew again, he would be unsurprised. Still, true to design, her remaining thruster manifolds still glowed a healthy red, proving her indelible engines still ran, the throbbing heartbeat of the ship stubbornly holding on despite all outward appearance. Her insignia and all of her paint, along with a fair eighty percent of the ablative coating, was all gone, either hanging in spinning shrapnel pieces around her, or floating away as clouds of vapor never to be reclaimed.

"Admiral…" Lai whispered, looking over the statistical readings he was getting from his scanners. "Look at what they've done to you." He breathed out, long and slow. "Well… old friend… it is good that I came when I did, isn't it?"

He shook his head at the mess as the last of the Brute vessels folded inward, the hull cratering and blowing out. It erupted in atmospheric fire before all the air had escaped, then glowed a discontented red-green as the core reactor boiled over, and finally detonated, shredding the vessel into the same graveyard that had claimed all the others.

"Councilor, the fight has concluded. Shields are holding at forty percent, no hull damages." The helmsman announced.

"Good." Lai Tasha answered. "Load and launch every drop-craft, every shuttle, every ship we have capable of carrying more than one person, and send them to the _Inquisition of Purpose_. I don't trust that glow in her hull… I want every crew member on that ship out of there _before_ it decides to do something ugly."

"Yes, sir."


	19. Sworn Oaths

**Scene Five; **_**Sworn Oaths**_

The moon looked desolate, barren of much beyond blowing sand or silica or whatever it was it kept as dirt. There was a storm swirling around the southern side of the equator, so huge that it verily covered the entire bottom quarter of the world. The eye of the spinning storm might have been an easy three miles across, if not more.

"Lovely." Kuro mentioned.

"Looks like a nice world to take vacation on." Aardvark agreed, dourly. Behind them, Kitty pushed her head off the floor, and shook it, dizzily, before looking around, a puzzled expression on her face. "Is that you, Kitty?" Aardvark asked, without turning.

"If it is, you'd better turn around." Kuro said. "If it isn't, we both won't be having much more to say, now will we?"

Aardvark just grinned, wordlessly, as Kitty got to her hooves and stepped up between them, to peer out at the world – a large moon, at best, circling a gas giant – that they were approaching. "So," she asked, sparing a moment to rub the side of her head that had hit the floor first, "we're landing on that? Why?"

"I never said I was going to land on it…" Kuro said. "But Aardvark and I were discussing what it looked like." She adjusted some of the small ship's calibration, preparing another burn now the enginery had cooled from the last one. "We ought to be able to make a cut around the Brutes we left behind, and start heading back… hey, we might even meet up with that SD."

Aardvark shook her head, almost as if in saddened disagreement; Kitty's expression twisted, noticing that, and she looked around, wondering what else could possibly go wrong since they were practically the only ship around, but there was nothing inside the ship to contraindicate Kuro's words either. Looking back ahead, though, she caught the beginnings of one of those feeling faces from the Admiral's mate.

"Does anyone smell anything?" She asked, tentative. "Hear a soft whistle, perhaps…?"

Again, Aardvark just shook her head, and this time Kuro looked over at her. "What? What is it?"

She looked back at her. "What do your senses tell you, Kuro?"

"I have a bad feeling, suddenly, but…" She didn't get to finish, as impact rocked the artificial gravity hard enough to tumble Kitty from her hooves before ultimately causing her to float back off the floor again afterwards, the generators killed. The startled, horrified shriek that came out of Kuro made Aardvark laugh, even though it was a terribly inopportune moment to entertain any kind of mirth.

"Forerunner excrement!" Kitty cursed, swiping at anything she perceived to be in reach.

"What in the God's names was that?? Scanners are clean!" Kuro cried, distressed.

The grin on Aardvark's face looked feral, her odd calm bespeaking the side of her personality that edged on insanity. "You're not looking at the scanners, Kuro." She stated, smugly.

Kuro shot her a puzzled look. "You expected this??" She demanded.

Aardvark looked back at her. "Of course not… for as much as the forewarning we _both_ had just now could allow. But your systems are set to pick up engine signatures – if you hadn't recalibrated the systems to perform that piloting stunt you did when we escaped the Brute's armada, you'd have seen whatever it was that just hit us."

Kuro was about to respond when she paused, thinking about it for a moment. "You mean… ah, hell." She rolled her eyes, and banged her face off the control board once before snarling at it and resetting whatever systems would respond. Sure enough, right as the new systems data fed through, the ship rattled and groaned again, this time struck by a smaller floating space rock. Their little ship had come to rest in the middle of the asteroid belt around the gas giant, but the main window didn't show anything but the moon, which was several kilometers away from the outermost rock and sitting high in the orbit.

Behind them, Kitty gave an animal yowl, frustrated beyond her means for being trapped in freefall like she was, totally unable to reach anything around her. She was floating upside down from where she had been before, flailing without hitting any of the walls or bulkheads.

Aardvark blew a sigh at her, and reached back to smack her on a hoof, making her spin suddenly. Her axis wasn't in her midsection, though, and she first banged off the ceiling with a huff before grabbing the first wall that came up in reach at the conclusion of her sudden spin out. Shaking her head again, she settled her helmet again with her free hand, and looked back up at the two in the cockpit.

"Did we really park in a rock belt?" She asked, unsure if she thought that was cool or not.

"How about I answer your first question instead, Kitty?" Kuro asked, tiredly. "We really _are_ going to land on that moon… but not because we want to."

Punted quite hard in that direction, the small ship's nose began to glow softly, the beginnings of atmosphere lighting in friction against the hull.

"Don't you just love the weather?" Aardvark asked, before the sound of fire filled the ship's interior, drowning any further attempt at speech. The shape of the motions from Kuro's mandibles, though, spelled out 'hull breach'.

Aardvark could only shake her head, her expression bemused.


	20. Hollowed Be Thy Name

**Scene Six; **_**Hollowed Be Thy Name**_

"How is he?"

D1NG0, Flyer, Steel and several others were all gathered in the _Sovereign_'s medical bay, dozens of the _Inquisition_'s crew piled into the place seeking medical aid. While minorly wounded, Aozora had refused to be seen until some of the others who required more urgent help were out of the way.

Standing beside the stubborn Admiral, Lai Tasha could only shake his head. "Not good, by last prognosis. But Humans are peculiar creatures… and it would be prudent to wait and see."

Aozora only nodded. "We'll be needing his skills. I hope he makes it."

"Steel and a few of the others have already been released." Lai said, looking over at him. "You really ought to let someone look at you."

He shook his head. "No, the staff is overloaded. I am in no danger of dying, so I am not going to insist on attention."

Lai Tasha sighed, and shook his head, but he let it drop. "What was your last heading on the girls, Admiral?"

"Spinward. Vectors memory is a little fuzzy on me right now… in time I imagine I will recall them correctly. But their main heading has only wavered – it is almost as if they are being herded."

"Well, truth be told, no armada of any size can honestly withstand our own fleet, Admiral, and if I were a Brute, I'd be cutting folk from the group to pick them off in smaller numbers, too."

"That's what disturbs me, Councilor." Aozora sighed. "These Brutes… they're thinking objectively. Logically. Almost as if some Sangheili or Human were doing their thinking for them. It's weird."

"It disturbs more than just you, Admiral." Lai said. "The rest of the Council and I have conferred on this already. Soulguard had said something about a past event where one of our scouts had found evidence of Brute activity in a Forerunner Flood lab. It doesn't really matter what they were doing with it – just that they were at all is disturbing."

Aozora nodded. "Yes."

"If you are not going to allow someone to attend to your injuries, come to the bridge, and we'll go over headings and vectors, and see what comes up." Lai Tasha turned and began to walk away, so Aozora followed him, stepping faster for a short span to catch up and pace the Councilor at his elbow. "I heard from Rage the other day."

"He's back in range? What did he say?" Aozora asked.

"Message was pretty short. Said something about having found something that he didn't dare speak of over a comn line. Said he was heading in fast and hard and the information he had needed urgent attention."

Aozora looked at him oddly. "Then why did you take a dreadnaught and come for me?"

"Simple, friend." Lai looked over at him. "Calculating the worth of an unknown is exponentially less important to me than the lives of my Mirratord… another deciding factor was easily that your mission is quite possibly equally if not more important than anything Rage could come up with, and he's not in yet and you already are."

Aozora nodded. "Priority, then."

"In my best interests." Lai agreed. "I came here because I received word that a Brute armada three times the size of their old one had lifted from the shipyards at Gondoso four weeks ago. I knew what they were doing just in that they existed, and considering the current situation, so I came to catch up with you because no dreadnaught can bully its way through that _many_ ships."

"So, you came and rescued us, but though you didn't know that's what you'd be doing, that was what you came to do anyway?"

Lai nodded. "I didn't know you'd already gotten into that much trouble yet… but yes."

Aozora inclined his head. "We found Flood – the main infestation was successfully cleansed, but we didn't have time to glass the planet."

"Flood, now?" Lai Tasha asked, sounding surprised. "When will a problem be simple, old friend??" He sighed. "Why are there always layers and hidden elements?"

"Like the festering injury within our own ranks?" Aozora cast him a look.

Lai Tasha shook his head, sadly. "The hour grows dark indeed."

"Flood, Brutes, traitors, lost and missing, dead… power shifting. Yes, I would call that a dark hour, too." Aozora agreed. "What are we doing?"

Lai Tasha inhaled slowly, thinking. "I don't –" Whatever sentence he had meant to respond with cut off sharply when the distinctive sound of the shield being hit resonated through the halls. It reverberated like a drum, the sound rippling through the entire vessel and giving pause to all who were not immediately privy to current circumstances. Instead of finishing, Lai Tasha quickly activated his personal communicator. "Report!"

_"Nothing major, Councilor, just a straggler. We'll have them out of the way in a moment. Full report when we're finished."_

Aozora and Lai Tasha shared a look.

"Stragglers?"

-----------------

Even as the last of the single straggling cruiser imploded upon itself and shattered outward into a field of debris, slipspace windows began to open all across the sky, and a fleet of Brute ships poured through. The _Sovereign of Stars_ turned on a portside aft axis, to face them, her already warmed guns sliding back out from their sheathed, concealed ports. A fresh salvo launched from the newly arrived fleet, but before any of the shots had a chance of hitting the target, one and all of the ships recharged their slipspace engines and were gone through a set of new windows.

The Mirratord's vessel was left alone with the sizzling array of incoming plasma rounds, but though she avoided all but a few, and those few doing no damage at all, it left a sense of inconclusive curiosity.

Was this a halfway point? Brutes were not known to avoid a fight, especially after having started one. The ships had simply jumped in, seen them, popped off enough firepower to obliterate a normal Cruiser, then jumped away again before their kill could be confirmed.

As Lai and Aozora made the bridge, their own craft slipped through a slipspace rupture, having tagged the signal and gone running in pursuit.

"What in hell is going on?" Lai Tasha asked, a little behind the curve.

"Brutes, sir." One of the helmsmen responded. "Appeared, shot at us, and fled even before the first round could hit. We were able to wind up our own slipspace engines in time to pursue at a close enough proximity to track them."

"Oh…" he paused for thought, then nodded. "Good."

"A whole other fleet?" Aozora asked. "Where are they all coming from?"


	21. Outcast Association

**Scene Seven; **_**Outcast Association**_

Kuro looked up, lifting her head to see what she might. The fore view plating was smashed, and sections and bits of transparent steel could be seen littered across the control board, as well as the floor decking. She blinked the haze out of her vision, and focused on the copilot's seat.

It wasn't there anymore.

She sat straighter, ducking her head when she discovered part of the overhead had come down about a foot and a half, then twisted to see farther around. The fore righthand corner of the craft had been torn away, and was gone. Kitty sat heaped in the back against the hatch, her mandibles resting on her chest.

Kuro inhaled, and blew a sigh. Aardvark was gone. She lifted the shredded straps from around her shoulders and slipped free of the seat to see if Kitty was alright. When she touched her the first time, though, it caused Kitty's head to snap up, eyes suddenly wide as saucers. Her tension relaxed a little as she took in her surroundings, and then looked up at Kuro.

"Part of the ship is missing." Kitty said.

Kuro nodded, smiling grimly. "I saw it before you did, Kitty, I know that already."

"No, I mean…" Kitty pointed at the hole, indignant. "I mean, it's _gone_… wait." She looked around again. "Where is Aardvark?"

"We hit a lot of crap coming down. This isn't the smoothest spot in the terrain… I think that wherever the rest of our ship is, that's likely where we'll find Aardvark." Kuro said. "Come on… can you stand? We need to get moving." Taking one of Kitty's arms, Kuro helped her stand up.

Once they had left the ship, stepping down out through the breach, the pair were better able to take in their surroundings. Looking past the aft of their broken ship, they were able to see a path of destruction several miles long, that began at the peak of a jagged mountain. Kuro sighed. "I should have stayed in bed."

"If you had, I'd be dead now." Kitty said.

"Why?" Kuro looked at her. "I was the one who was piloting that thing when it crashed."

"Yeah, but I'm the one who speared my own ship through a Cruiser. You don't remember when you picked me up, I was holding my hand over a hull breach, trying not to lose all my air?" Kitty protested. "I'm alive; that's saying something… right?"

Kuro sighed, but she had to agree. "Well… do we look for whatever remains of Aardvark, or do we try to see if this world hasn't got something technological on it?"

"Can't we do both at once?" Kitty asked, thinking herself genius.

"Chances are good, Kitty, that whatever we ran over on our way down isn't exactly going to be worth having right now." Kuro corrected. "Come on… let's get some supplies out before we go." She turned, and climbed back into the crashed ship.

Kitty looked back at the distant, broken mountain peak, and sighed. "Why does Aardvark always have all the fun?"

Several hours later, having hiked over more vertical terrain than either of them liked, they were no closer than a single mile. Everything being so vertical, so high and so deep, was slowing them down to a virtual crawl. Finally, Kuro sat down on a narrow outcropping, and blew a sigh. "I can still see where the soot overtakes the paint on that ship from here."

"Don't remind me." Kitty grouched, all her usual spunk gone from the endless tiring hours climbing over endless vertical rock faces. She ascended a little past Kuro, to a ledge, and sat there. "Why can't Aardvark come to us?"

"Maybe she is, if she's at all capable." Kuro looked over and up at her companion. "But don't you think she'd appreciate that we were heading in her direction as well, if she couldn't move far?"

Kitty sighed. "How many people that you know of have survived being torn from their ship during entry burn?"

Kuro held up a hand, extending one finger. "So far… I'd like to say… one."

Kitty scowled. "I hate mountains. I hate rocks. And I hate working myself to death trying to cross them!"

"Now that, at least, we can agree on." Kuro said. "What I wouldn't give for a working Phantom."

"How about that Cruiser you said was coming for us?"

"Well, seeing as how we can't precisely flee very much farther now we're rockside, I'd say they'll be catching up here soon." She looked up, right at the same instant that a Phantom shot past, skimming the tops of the canyons. The buffeting air blasted them both from their perches, along with several tons of grit and gravel, but when they finally got their hooves back under them, what they saw was not Mirratord, but Brutes.

"It's a damn good thing I'm already pissed off at those guys." Kitty snapped. "Or I'd have just gotten royally pissed off right then!"

"Go ahead." Kuro groaned. "Looks like they're investigating our wreckage back there. They're going to see it hasn't got anyone in it… oh, no." She looked over at Kitty. "Did you grab the Index?"

Kitty gave her one of her signature blank looks. "What Index?"

-----------

Daylight fell in striated streaks through the sifting dust, the wind causing some of it to curl in interesting patterns. Some of the particles seemed bigger than others, but each appeared willing enough to sift upwards as well as down.

Aardvark rolled her head to one side, and blinked, at first thinking the haze either in her brain or her eyes. When the first coherent thought rolled through and she finished rubbing her eyes out, she proved to herself this was not the case. She was, however, still strapped to her seat in Kuro's ship… or what remained of Kuro's ship. She hung upside down, resting against those straps, the fraction of vessel propped like a cup over an open area between what looked like a flat rock face and a broken boulder. All her blood had settled in her head, but for reasons she couldn't seem to define, this did not stop her from regaining consciousness.

Perhaps she hadn't been there that long. Aardvark looked around, blinking the blood-pressure related spots out of her eyes, until finally she remembered where the belt latches were and tried to disengage them. When this proved too much a task for her battered and flooded brain to handle, she reached for a sword.

"Argh!" Once again, almost true to form, one was missing. It seemed every time she had an accident or a turn of ill luck, one or the other of her twin blades would disappear, and invariably either the enemy claimed it and used it to try to convince her brethren they had killed her, or her brethren found it and thought her dead.

Either outcome was infinitely frustrating, as doubtless one or the other situation was liable to happen in this case as well, unless her luck turned around sharply and she found it herself.

Once cut free, Aardvark smacked into the hard, broken gravel surface beneath her, and sprawled on it, groaning. Landing on gravel was never pleasant, even with hardened armor on. She wanted to stay there for a while, let her new bruises ease up, but they were only being pressured, as she was, by the uneven surface she lay on. Grumbling about fortunes and woes, Aardvark rolled onto her hooves, and after listening for a moment to determine that there was no one – ally or enemy – around, she began to sift through the strewn wreckage left by the crashing ship she had arrived in.

She eventually did find the second sword, but there was no way to get at it; it had rolled down into a crevasse barely wide enough to admit the item itself, down far enough to look deep indeed, and not wide enough for her arm. She growled at it, and sighed, sitting back.

"Now what?" She asked, looking around again before looking her own self over. Aardvark laughed at what she saw. Never before had she looked outwardly so beat up and sooty without actually being bloody or broken beneath that damaged armor. Apparently, she had done a fair bit of roasting after separating from the majority of the craft – for certain there was not enough tonnage of wreckage here to count for all of the ship – but not enough to actually be cooked. It was an odd irony.

Still… somehow typical of Aardvark. She spent a moment grouching about this aspect before getting back to her hooves and starting to walk along what she hoped was the right direction to meet the end of the entry burn stripe the ship had left.

Maybe, just maybe, the other two had made it down alive as well. She didn't go far, though, falling short of the first pitfall even when she fell to her knees, her teeth bared as she weathered down the sudden shooting pain of fractured femurs.

They weren't broken… but they had been battered worse than the rest of her, and it was telling now that she was trying to actually walk. The injury, while mainly slight, would be a major impediment in this terrain. Aardvark sat down again, this time grouching in a more colorful manner.

Around her, the mountains echoed with her unsavory words.

------------------

The Phantom slowed to a hover, and settled over the crash site, before the gravity lift in its belly opened and Brutes began to funnel down through it. They had seething yellow eyes and upgraded, newly designed armor, their persons augmented for special purpose; eliminating the Sangheili faction known as the Mirratord effectively and completely, once and for all.

Catching said faction was really the hard part, though, as even though the Phantom had been swift, the craft was already emptied by the time they had arrived. Their scout Cruiser in orbit had radioed its position, and word of a Mirratord fleet assembled to combat them had their own ships scrambling hard and fast to capture this Index first. If they lost it to the Mirratord, then their prerogatives would shift from elimination detail to intel, and no Brute enjoyed having to talk to or listen to a Sangheili, for any reason and under any circumstances.

Intel just wasn't as much fun as outright butchery. The good news was that the thieving Sangheili Mirratord were still trapped on the moon; and it was a small moon indeed, meaning no matter where they went, they couldn't get far before someone found them again, and reclaimed the lost Index. Better still, the Mirratord were on their hooves, meaning they would be slow and easy to catch. The Brutes filed back up into the Phantom, and its engines glowed sharply with excess of fuel as it accelerated away again.

In space, the Cruiser probed for the Index again, as slipspace windows opened farther out from the gravity well of the sun. The remainder of the Brute fleet poured through them, responding to the scout's call. If any Mirratord fleet turned up, they would have hell to pass to steal away with their operatives or the Index before the Brutes could claim it.

Each ship settled into a geo-synchronous orbit in a pattern alongside the first, only a few staying out away from the moon where they could more easily maneuver for the enemy fleet they were expecting.

The Brutes sat in waiting for over eight hours, but when the fleet finally arrived, it came in far greater numbers than was expected, and the Cruisers began to peel away from the planet even before the sides were within firing range. Right before the ranks got close enough, both sides began to bleed fightercraft, but the enemy 'fighters' quickly became better known as giant rocks before any fight could be met! The Brutes in the seraphs began trying to blast them away, but their small cannons couldn't do much damage to the shooting asteroids. Most of them slammed hard into the Cruiser's shielding past the fleet of fighters, only a bare few breaking apart in the space between the closing ranks.

The Brutes' initial salvo streaked forward uncontested, but the enemy fleet was behaving erratically, and without cohesion. No two were acting in tandem, and for certain as a mass their whole number were not acting like a fleet.

Had the Mirratord lost their minds?

The answer came when as the first salvo tore into the attacking fleet and the first few stones broke through shield and hull on the Brutes' side. Spores of grey-green and putrid black fluffed from the wounds in the burning ships as Flood combat forms, many of them wearing Brute bodies, stormed the ships they had managed to puncture.

Fire lanced between the two sides, the Flood fleet acting like a pack of starving wolves, the Brutes attempting a cohesive patterned defense grid, but neither's action allowed for error in the least. Ships bulged and blew apart, shredding and dispersing under the constant barrage. The stones that didn't smack into the ships and either punch through or spiral away again barreled down through the atmosphere on the moon, crashing instead into the ground below.

Just when the fight appeared worst, another slipspace window yawned open, and yet another Cruiser nosed through into normal space, just in time to settle between a shot and its target.

The impact caused the shielding to ripple in an odd manner, and it shoved the nose of the vessel to port hard enough to point them more or less at the Flood with their aft to the Brutes. The vessel, once recovered from the shock of such a sudden assault, opened up with more cannons than it ought to have owned, blasting away in both directions as it began to nose through the fray of bullets, trying not to get hit too much.

It was the _Sovereign of Stars_.


	22. Kin And Bloodkin

**Scene Eight; **_**Kin And Bloodkin**_

Aozora looked up, blinking, as the lights above him swam slightly. He saw Lai Tasha appear above him, and shortly he was seized and hauled off the floor. The exit of the command deck came up to them and passed, as the Councilor hauled him along. "You should have had that injury seen to hours ago!" he was saying.

Aozora shook his head to clear it, then frowned at the hall ahead of them. "What happened?"

"We made normal space." Lai Tasha began, filling in the last few seconds of details. "You passed out and collapsed before then, but as soon as we'd made normal space, we got hit, like the round was waiting for us, already fired. There are not one but two fleets out there, duking it out over that moon."

"Moon?"

"The good news is we were able to detect the signature of the Index down there – which means we have finally caught up with the girls. Or Aardvark, at least. We can't even know if they still possess it anymore. But that it's there and not on one of the Brute's ships, means that they took it there before anything bad could have happened to them."

"Where are you taking me?" The Admiral asked.

"To get you patched up. I'm going to need you to track down that mate of yours after we've gotten Aardvark and Kitty back, and you can't do that if you're going to be dying of internal bleeding on me."

"What?" Aozora asked, sounding puzzled. "We didn't find Kuro too?"

"We have no intel suggesting Kuro ever made contact with Aardvark or Kitty. Chances are good she isn't even in the area. But with fights like the one happening outside going on, it would behoove us to find and collect her before her little ship gets erased. I doubt anyone would notice her, though, considering the size of the fighting going on."

"We can't let that happen!" Aozora insisted.

"You're delirious." Lai Tasha scolded. "You didn't listen."

"I don't understand… if she's not here, how can she be killed by this fight?"

Lai Tasha shook his head. "I didn't say this fight. I said if our myriad enemies have this kind of clout to be throwing around, I seriously doubt that this will be the only battle like this we see."

"Oh." Aozora contemplated that. "We found the Index?"

"We don't have possession of it yet, though." Lai Tasha confirmed. "Here we are." He stepped through the door of the medical, in time to see Flyer sit up from the bed where he'd been laid almost three days ago.

"Flyer." Lai greeted. "How do you feel?"

"Like I got hit, sir." He responded, hoarsely. "I'm told I spent more time in surgery than I usually spend in a cockpit."

Lai spared him an amused laugh before handing the Admiral off to a doctor. "Good, are you fit for duty?"

The Human shrugged. "Not if my helm controls are going to reach up and bite me again, no sir. I was told if I did something crazy like that again, I'd likely not survive it."

"Doctors always underestimate a determined warrior." Lai assured him. "But I doubt we'll need to blow everyone away this time, nor shall we have exclusive attention; there are Brutes, and there are Flood. Invariably, they will want to keep fighting one another despite also fighting us."

Flyer brightened. "Wow. Okay. What's going on, sir?"

Lai folded his arms over his chest, and blew a weary sigh. "We have the girls in sight. What we don't know is if any of them are still alive or if there are three or just the two. We couldn't get close enough to the moon to verify anything at all before we were dragged into the fight going on in orbit."

"Oh." Flyer contemplated that. "Permission to take the helm, sir?"

Lai shook his head. "Denied; I'll need your exceptional expertise flying my valuable arse through that mess to reach the surface in a smaller craft; I want to take three Phantoms to the moon and do a detailed scout and recon to determine the location of the Index and the whereabouts and condition of our operatives."

"And how many." Flyer filled in.

He nodded. "Yes. Get your armor on, Flyer; as soon as the Admiral is back on his hooves, we're leaving."

Flyer threw a salute. "Yes, sir!" He hopped past the medic before they could say a word, and departed, to reclaim his SPI suit. He figured considering the damage it had taken, he would likely find it with Steel, in his trans-dimensional Forge. How the SPARTAN had pushed the thing into that time-space envelope was beyond the pilot, but it was nifty nonetheless.

* * *

Though left to sit initially, the Admiral's injury proved minor enough that it only took three hours worth of attention and correction before he was not only back on his hooves, but back in the game as well. Lai Tasha could be heard muttering to himself about wishing for the 'old days when the Council was not broken', but his motions were direct and precise, as if despite his grouching and woes, he believed he could still accomplish what had to be done.

Flyer was given the helm of the primary craft, and linked system controls for the additional two, which would be flying flanks. If either pilot in either of the wing-ships stepped into a hairy position, Flyer could squeeze them out of it by assuming command of their control board. Though given an additional dose of whatever medications it had been that was also given to Aozora, the human was doing remarkably better than the Admiral for the sheer discipline of focus from flying for so long in all possible environments; the instant his hands touched the controls, a rush of adrenalin raced through his system, and he was ready. The Admiral, on the other hand, was sitting still, and becoming lightheaded and groggy for his trouble.

Lai Tasha's expression spread a slow smile as he watched his friend slowly nod off without even realizing he was doing it. "Flyer, what's our status?" He asked, without bothering to turn his head to see the pilot.

"Doing good, sir, considering this mess is a furball minus the planes." Flyer responded, casually. "Wingmen are stable and maintaining positions."

"What's clearance through this mess?" Lai Tasha asked, peering curiously past the pilot's head.

"Under good conditions, upwards of a kilometer…" Flyer began, but Lai cut him off with a strangled noise.

"Just _a_ kilometer, Flyer??"

The SPI trooper cocked his head and looked back and up at the High Councilor while simultaneously leaning slightly away from him. "Yes, sir…"

"So… that's optimal, then?" Lai Tasha asked, trying to look at it objectively. Not getting smacked by a plasma ball of fury the size of the ship he was in by barely a single kilometer was marginally better than getting smacked by said ball squarely, but in the end, if marginally meant alive, then he'd take the kilometer.

Maybe that was why it was so goddamn warm! He stepped away from the pilot without waiting for or allowing room for further speech or discussion, plucking at his armor's undersuit absently with his claws as he stepped back towards the seating. There were grips for standing room as well, but these spaces were taken up by other Mirratord who had agreed to or volunteered for the mission.

Apparently, some of them knew one or the other – or more than one of – the girls rather well, and were quite interested to see them all back safe again. Everyone missed EvilKitty's incessant bantering, Aardvark's passionate temper and Kuro's soothing but annoying habit of mothering everyone. Of all the girls, Kuro was the best respected, but not because she was fearsome or dangerous in some subtle or otherwise way, but because she retained her eyes-in-the-back-of-the-head from her young when dealing with other adults.

No one, not even the sly and slick Aardvark, could get something past the female. Even if Kuro had her back turned and her head down.

It wasn't long before the gravity began to shift about subtly, signaling they had entered atmosphere. Not that the anti-gravity and inertial dampeners inside a Phantom were of poor quality, but more that Lai had rather expected to be engaged in a dogfight of some kind – in part what the two wingmen were for – the moment they got close to the moon. Close, in layman's terms, meant in the atmosphere. Especially if one had asked Flyer for said definition.

Lai Tasha looked over to his left, to see the Admiral had his mandibles resting on his chest, much of his position relaxed against the wall of the Phantom. He wasn't quite asleep, nor unconscious; the Admiral had been at the task of Mirratord Imperial Admiral for a few years too many to really allow such a flaw in his paradigm. If the situation required it, he could practically dump a load of adrenalin into his system on demand, and be leaping through quick action inside of a heartbeat.

The only flaw in that idea was the reaction of the internal stimulant pretty much required that other part… where it was required. Aozora was not slow, nor weak, but even he was not immune to the rather powerful drugs in his bloodstream at current. Unless attacked, or provided with some other equally pressing situation, he wasn't liable to be as clearheaded as he might like for some time to come.

Lai Tasha wasn't worried about that.

He was worried what Aozora might do if it was discovered his mate was killed. Though by far more unstable, the reaction that Lone had given upon the loss of Aardvark once had been repercussion enough. Lai Tasha was in no way willing to suffer such a mood twice.

If it really came to that, Lai Tasha felt prepared to leave Aozora alone on that moon for as long as it took to cool his doubtless riled temper. He retained the hope, however, that it never had to come to that. While he knew his friends and compatriots rather well, Lai understood that there were some things about a person that was simply better off remaining unknown.


	23. GEAR Loadout

**Scene Nine; **_**G.E.A.R. Loadout**_

That the moon was undoubtedly small had never been in question. But that night – or some semblance of it, considering it was cast by a secondary planetoid rather than the side of the moon they were on rolling away from the sun it was orbiting around – had come so quickly, had still been a shock to the system. Kitty blew a sigh, and sat down again.

"I feel like we've walked our legs off and gone nowhere. This looks exactly like the same place we stopped to rest, before." She commented.

"Yes, but we haven't been circling by virtue of the fact that we have yet to actually _follow_ any one of these canyons or fissures… or whatever they are." Kuro pointed out. She looked around, doing a slow turn until she had come full circle, as if trying to understand why something she had expected was not there. All around them were stones and loose rocks, although by Kitty's estimate only one of the rocks present could be referred to respectively as an actual honest boulder. The rest were just too small.

Kitty dropped her gaze, and studied the gravel and small stones between her splayed legs, noting their almost perfect ratio pattern. For so many square inches of small pebbles, there would be a larger, thumb-sized stone. For so many thumb-sized stones, one would find a fist sized bruiser just perfect, so had claimed Aardvark one sunny day at the beach, for knocking heads.

Kitty had never seen Aardvark throw a rock, let alone one aimed at someone else's head.

Kuro turned back to see Kitty. "Are you even listening to me anymore?"

Kitty looked up, then smiled innocently, and nodded energetically. "Uh huh!"

Kuro cocked her head, giving the other female an indignant look. Her next words were somewhat muffled and a little on the suggestive side, but Kitty couldn't discern if it was meant to be derogatory, or just accusatory in that Kitty was not precisely behaving like an adult. Having children had done that to Kuro, as little ones not only did hear everything their parents said, they also made sure everyone else knew what said parental couple had had to say.

Eventually, Kitty did stand back up, and stride as if meaningfully towards and then past her companion, feeling every unintended bruise and sore spot in the muscles of her legs from traversing so many miles of stone faces in so short a time span. At current, they were on a stretch of the area that wasn't split into broad fissures and equally as narrow ribbons of cliff faces, and were just a few strides from the high spot. They had chosen not to settle there for obvious reasons, but nearby it also for obvious reasons.

Still, silhouetting one's self on the high spot was not particularly objectionable when it was dark out, and they were already _on_ the moon… being outlined by any glowing orbital satellite was particularly out of the question at this point.

Kuro watched as she went, then shook her head and walked after her for a span until Kitty stopped, sitting down again on the one lone rock that sat there on the high spot. Kuro moved up beside her, standing slightly away from the rock, her arms crossed as she watched from a more or less neutral standpoint as her eccentric companion performed a strange, and seemingly unnecessary motion.

Finally coming to a complete stop, Kitty turned her head to the side, to look at Kuro.

"What?" Kuro asked.

EvilKitty made a face at her, but said nothing.

Finally, able to take no more, Kuro pressed, "Well, _what_?" Her arms came unfolded from across her armored chest to emphasize her desire to know.

Kitty downright scowled at her, then. "Will you be quiet??" She demanded. "I can't hear it past your yammering."

Kuro was about to protest that snipe when she changed her mind, and instead committed the next several moments to listening intently. The wind was thin and loud here, the fissures in the ground not helping the resonant acoustics. But there was definitely something there in that otherwise unremarkable sound that resembled another Kuro had heard at some point in her past.

Kitty tipped her head, frowning slightly. "I didn't know there were that many verses to that song…"

"Wait, what?" Kuro pressed, again. "Verses? What song is it?"

"Rallying Cry." Kitty supplied, helpfully.

"Rallying Cry?" Kuro mused. "Sounds familiar, what type of music is it?"

Kitty frowned pointedly at her companion. "Aardvark made it _up_, numbskull."

"She's alive! And feeling well enough to sing!" Kuro squealed.

"Hush." Kitty sighed. "We already knew that or we wouldn't have come this way."

Kuro laughed at her, ecstatic. They hadn't – it had been an assumption on Kuro's part. But she was really starting to like the accuracy of her senses and assumptions; especially when it meant people reappeared alive and well… or well enough… rather than remaining missing indefinitely or turning up but being dead when they finally did. "Am I good or am I good?" She asked, still excited.

Kitty just clicked her mandibles in irritation and rolled her eyes. "You're hopeless, is what you are. I shouldn't have to tell you what you just told to me!"

* * *

Though the landing area had not been previously occupied, Lai Tasha got the distinct impression that it quickly would be, and it made him wonder if the Brutes weren't still looking for that lost Forerunner relic. The idea almost made him laugh. Flyer, meanwhile, was starting to feel a little pale and drawn, but he shook the cobwebs from his head and blinked the blur from his eyes insistent upon not only clearing the landing site but also making a successful drop – if he got that far, crashing wouldn't be such a big deal.

Matters were not particularly helped in that there was a high-ranking member of the High Council leaning over his shoulder, watching through the main view port past his head. At least, Flyer mused, he wasn't watching what Flyer was doing from the _inside_ too much.

Still, there were some things that just couldn't be helped too much. Having gone straight back to work straight out of surgery, he had been feeling fine then but was starting to get lightheaded now. It was the last thing he needed, especially since anywhere right now excepting the Mirratord's own ship was a firing zone. He couldn't afford to lose his mind nor his concentration, and his own training and senses were screaming at him incoherently to batter down the impulse to nod off right there in the cockpit going at three hundred knots over stony terrain on some moon somewhere deep in unknown space.

Despite all his techniques and determination and training, his eyes had already glazed over, and he couldn't focus right past the fuzz. If he hadn't been so familiar with a cockpit's layout already he would have crashed them long ago. Even blurred over, he could still make out what the instruments were telling him, but what his innards were telling him was that the outside world was fixing to get bumped down a notch on the priority list very shortly.

He shook his head, trying to clear it, and sighed. If he could just make it through the dropoff, then he could find a crevasse to land in, and after that someone else could peel his augmented carcass out of the chair he was strapped to and fly the Phantom out themselves. If he was lucky – if everyone was lucky – that someone would be competent enough to get all of them out intact, after the ground team had finished their survey.

Gods only knew how long that was going to take. Flyer could only hope they didn't get raked from orbit before then. No Phantom, augmented by the Mirratord or not, could withstand being strafed by a cruiser's guns.

He found a likely landing site, and set them down on the grounding barriers that held all Phantoms in the air when in hover mode. As soon as they were still, the wind on the moon began to kick the ships around, trying to unseat them as they deployed their cargo.

Lai Tasha brought his rifles up as soon as his hooves hit dirt, and began to pace to one side as the others deployed down the beam behind him. Here the ground was torn and broken, sheer faces surrounding them in depths of anywhere from five feet to fifty. The cliff side on the east looked like someone had slammed a Longsword into it, at one point, but was otherwise unmarred by anything otherwise unnatural. Straight ahead there were unevenly floored fissures going everywhere, and left and right he saw several eruptions that were several feet tall but only a few in thickness – the ground was so badly broken here he half wondered if the moon hadn't been smacked a good one while its component minerals and alloys weren't still soft and liable to do something like this when hit.

With Aozora beside him, Lai Tasha moved out, the SPARTAN compliment from the second Phantom the first to catch up as the other Sangheili from the third one filed up in the rear. They moved at a swift trot, and in staggered formation, Lai Tasha leading, Aozora directly behind and to his left. At the first sign of enemy activity, though, the lot of them all engaged their camouflage engines, and each and all vanished from view.

At first, it seemed minimal enemy activity, but with less than a half a mile between them and their drop site, the tail-end Charlie suddenly sent forward an alarm indicator, as the rear of their procession curled sharply to the right in a paisley design. Mobile artillery had cut off their retreat; and it looked like if the Phantoms didn't move in a hurry, they would be taken right out of the sky by that small fleet of Wraith tanks!

Lai Tasha looked back, and though he considered calling back to Flyer for a moment, he knew it was a bad idea; he hadn't survived to become a veteran by being twitchy, after all. Flyer could take care of himself. If he saw a need to move, he would. In the mean time, though, Lai and the rest needed to move forward with their own mission.

After all, there really was no point in a retreat if the mission hadn't even been attempted yet. There was no attack; so the group continued on their own way.


	24. What We Have Here

**Scene Ten; **_**What We Have Here**_

Aozora stepped up onto the rock shelf that was as high as his waist, maintaining his crouched position once he was on it for a few strides before suddenly lunging upwards, igniting the sword in his hand only just before his hand would have impacted the Brute's back. The creature gave a startled burble, but his air was cut, and could not scream. The Brute died quietly, sagging backwards onto the Admiral's arm.

Aozora lowered the body to the stone, then flipped it over the same edge he'd had to crest to come up behind it. The place was so uneven… had stayed that way, too… that not a soul could have seen all angles or even all the watchers one put to see all angles in this place.

As such, at the same time he took down the Brute watching at his angle, over a dozen others all perished in a similar manner all across the stone outcropping. Just beyond the last Brute, the rocks fell away, falling a goodly hundred or so feet before the ground leveled off and became more or less flatlands.

There, the dirt had smoothed over, possibly volcanic runoff, and then set about cracking, some of it dissolving in the wind, and creating the shifting surface that was blowing around. Since the layer of silt like topsoil was so thin, though, the dunes, what there were of them, were less than an inch high.

And a half mile from the rocks, a strange alien version of grass encroached. Beyond that, the strike team could see what remained of Kuro's little seraph. It had stopped smoldering some hours ago, but it had still left a dark smudge on the sky above it.

Aozora stepped past the ridge, and jumped down the other side onto a more or less large flat open area in the rocks, right as Lai Tasha and Spartan 249 did the same. Others began to filter in, having successfully cleared the area of Brutes for the time being.

"All clear, Councilor." Aozora said, nodding his head to Lai.

"Good work." He seemed distracted from the answer, though, his eyes tracing the rock outline on the sky south of the crash site.

"Are we going to go see what's left of that seraph?" 249 asked, apprehensively. "We really don't have all day – the Flood could land here at any moment."

"Other than the Brutes, there is nothing here to attract Flood, Spartan." Lai Tasha said, absently.

"Why are you looking in that direction, Councilor?" Aozora pressed, suddenly unable to contain the question any longer. "Kuro's ship is there." He pointed behind the other Elite.

"Yes, and have you not thought why there would be Brutes in these worthless, annoying rocks if there really was anything worth having at that crash site, good Admiral?" Lai Tasha asked, tilting his head to look back at his friend.

Aozora contemplated that. "You're right. I hadn't thought of that. I got so used to Brutes just being everywhere…"

"Brutes are never _just_ everywhere, my friend. They are simple minded, but they are not stupid, not especially. They do not go where there is nothing to attract them. And I daresay the hunting in this region is not exactly ideal."

The finishing comment got a chuckle from someone behind 249, and he waved them down when Aozora cast a look that way, then subtly swiped a Spartan smile at them when the Admiral stopped looking.

That made one of the Elites laugh, though he did manage to keep it down.

"Where would we begin, though?" Aozora asked.

"I should think that unless there is a mineral composite in these rocks that impedes it, we should be in radio range at this point." Lai Tasha offered. "I haven't tried it yet, though."

"If there is blockage because of these damn cliff faces…" Aozora grumped, lifting his radio and flipping it on for the first time since deployment. The whole team had been running silent to avoid having the entire Brute occupation converge on them. He played with the gadget for a while, then pointed at 249 abruptly. He twitched his finger at the human a few times, indicating he was to activate his own comns unit for a test.

A little startled by the sudden pointing, it took a moment for him to react, but he did turn his radio on, and he set it on the usual Mirratord frequency. There was a strange white-noise squeal, a very faint hiss, then nothing but an open, static emptiness. It was like putting one's ear to a cave, where no water dripped and no voices resounded.

Aozora frowned at his radio for a moment, working the settings until he finally gave up. "There is a composite in the rocks." He ground out. "I swear by all the Gods both Covenant and Ancestral, I am going to flatten this range at the first opportunity!!"

"Calm yourself, Admiral." Lai Tasha soothed. "We can start with that direction." He indicated a likely path through the rocks. Then he turned to the others. "Split into two teams, one flanks right, one flanks left, the Admiral and I are going straight ahead. If either of you runs into a dead hollow, cut inward so we don't lose track of each other. Be advised, we may be doing a great deal of climbing from here on out."

There was a slightly muted chorus of yes-sirs, before the group split up and they all began to move. Lai Tasha's assessment became evident as truth almost immediately, though, when through the first fissure Aozora encountered a sheer rock face that went up almost three hundred feet. He swore at it, a little tired of jumping around on rocks already. If this kept up, he just knew he'd be in a sour mood indeed when he eventually did find his mate again.

* * *

"Well, this is the rest of the seraph." Kuro's voice resonated through the windswept hollow, the peaks on three sides and the drop off on the other lending a very shallow echo to the place.

EvilKitty lifted a torn sheet of hull plating with a hoof, and pushed it away. "I don't see anything to indicate Aardvark was here, though."

Kuro knelt down under a u-shaped chunk of the debris, and looked up. "I do."

Kitty came trotting over as quickly as the wreckage would allow, and bent to see what Kuro might have found. Hopefully it wasn't Aardvark's legs without the rest of Aardvark attached to them. She saw nothing… aside from part of a copilot's seat.

Kuro pointed at the belts. "These aren't broken – they're cut. That means she either sliced herself free, or someone else already got here."

Kitty frowned. "I hate these games."

"Acknowledging that won't make the game any easier, Kitty." Kuro sighed, settling to one side and looking over the strewn debris. "At least there's no blood."

"Blood would be bad, yes." Kitty mused, stepping away and walking around through the mess for a while before stopping and staring down into one of the smaller cracks in the rock.

"What did you find?"

"Classic indication Aardvark got her arse whipped for her." Kitty said, squatting down and trying to fit her hand down in the crack. "Agh!"

Kuro came over, and squatted beside her companion. "What is it, though?"

Kitty plucked her hand from the crack, and waved it around. "My hand is too fat." She indicated down in the crack, so Kuro looked down.

"Oh." She said, sounding speculative. She reached down, and pulled the single-blade hilt up out of the crack. She looked at it, then at Kitty. "This is a classic indicator that Aardvark was in trouble?"

"She _always_ loses one of her swords each time she gets in over her head."

"Every time?" Kuro asked.

"Every time." Kitty nodded somberly.

"I _HEARD_ that!!" Echoed a voice from down the side of the dropoff.

Kitty and Kuro looked as one in that direction, then at each other. "Aardvark!" They chorused, at one another. Kitty got out ahead, though, when they scrambled for the edge, and looked down. There was actually a gradient slope on one side, and about half way down was the assassin-bard, sitting against a jutting rock, looking back up at them.

"I said I heard that." She told them, darkly. "And iffen my own hands weren't too damn fat, I'd have spared myself that comment just now!"

"Aardvark!" Kuro scrambled down the incline, sending pebbles and gravel rolling down the slope as she slid down to where Aardvark was. "We thought the worst when you didn't crash where we did."

She sighed. "Yeah, I tend to do that… it's annoying, to me, too."

"Are you hurt?" Kuro asked, as Kitty slid down too.

"Only marginally. Few scrapes, a bump or bruise… think I put some stress lines in my bones, but I'll live."

"Good, we should leave before the Brutes come through here."

"Damn, they followed us this far?"

"Yeah, they did. I think they got the Index, too, because we don't have it." Kuro admitted.

Aardvark grinned stupidly at her, and held out a glowing, T-shaped item. "You don't have it because I have it, silly." She giggled.

* * *

Twilight happened, then dark threatened, but Aozora felt he almost knew where he was going. Sheer walls and drops stood to slow his way, but he kept going despite the delays. Just over that ridge, just past that gorge, there was Kuro.

How he longed to see her again! How he wanted to be assured she was safe, and whole, where he could protect her. Right when he thought he was seeing things, though, he heard Lai Tasha exclaim. "Ahead. I see a light."

"You do?" Aozora asked, surprised.

He got a strange look for it. "Yes, I do."

"That is good!" Aozora decided. "Because I see it, too. That means I'm not seeing things."

"You never cease to amaze, Admiral." Lai Tasha muttered.

It took another fissure and another sharp canyon wall before they reached the light, up on a small surface surrounded by jagged, torn-looking rocks that all had caves in them. Here, the rocks became denser, less slate-like, and were apparently porous.

But there was nothing but the light, lying on the cold stone, burning like a flare in the night. Disappointed, Aozora bent, and scooped it up to look at it dejectedly. "That was the worst letdown I've suffered in my whole life." He decided.

Lai Tasha patted his shoulder. "We'll find them. This moon is small – it shouldn't be a long night at all. Soon day will rise, and we'll be able to see over more terrain."

He tripped the button on his radio again anyway, seeking an echo, a reply, something. He flipped the plasma lamp off, and tucked it under his belt, and was about to move on, when he heard something clicking, echoing back on itself.

He drew to a stop, and tilted his head, seeking a direction. When he finally had it, he darted that way, startling Lai Tasha out of a thought. The rest of the Mirratord members with them hurried after him, and they found the Spartans and had gone past before the clicking stopped.

There, though, something else seemed to be off.

"Kuro?" Aozora called, tentative about calling Brute attention instead.

There was a brief silence, before sliding and bouncing rocks rattled off to their left, and from the dark recesses of the shadows of the rocks, strode the one soul he'd been dying to see.

He swept her up in his arms, relieved to find her not only whole and alive but apparently healthy as well. For a moment, nothing else mattered, and the Imperial Admiral let himself smile.


	25. Mourning Glory

**Scene Eleven; **_**Mourning Glory**_

The run for the extraction point was hot, and rough. The cliff faces weren't so much the problem, quite as the constant barrage from behind. Under normal circumstances, the Mirratord attending the scene would not have fled, but there was an underlying sense of urgency; after all, one lone cruiser, no matter how augmented, couldn't possibly outlast _two_ fleets, especially when both were sizeable armadas and one of those two happened to be Flood comprised.

The group had made it halfway, or a little less, when the Brutes had shown up all of a sudden. Their arrival was so abrupt, in fact, that it took both sides a full heartbeat to realize they should start shooting at one another. After that, though, the fight hadn't waned much at all.

The Spartans hung in back at first, pegging at the Brutes and their Jackal counterparts with their Human weaponry, until at last the return fire had fried more than a little of their shielding mechanisms.

They then switched out for the secondary wing team, which while had a couple of SPI troopers, was mainly comprised of Elite warriors. These held the six while the newest rock face was addressed, then those on the top of the cliff covered them while they ascended after the rest were all up.

Brute tactics demanded more than cat-and-mouse, though, and it especially bothered the ape-like creatures to be so denied any real chance to charge in and slaughter something by blunt dismemberment. Thus far, all those who had dropped their guns and charged in on their knuckles had lost their lives far short of any such achievement. The Jackal's shield wall, however, was keeping the Mirratord's return fire from really doing a whole lot of damage.

The group all stopped, though, at the conclusion of the crest of the latest cliff face, because it was high enough the Brutes couldn't just shoot over it at them and force them to go on farther along. Still, the Brutes weren't stupid enough to just scramble up the thing after them promptly, and the Mirratord wasn't simple minded enough to think they would.

The tactic used, however, was of curious note; Spartan 249 turned to face whatever came over the cliff side, in time to see a Jackal come flying up like a dart, to roll once over its head and then stop on its feet in front of him.

Before it could fire up its arm shield, though, he smashed its head in with the butt of his MA5C-IV. As the body crumpled to his feet, lifeless, a fleet of others all sailed up at him, causing him to scramble back in alarm. Jackals could do many things – but they shouldn't fly! Logically he understood the Brutes were probably throwing them, but the facts hadn't quite sunk that far into his brain just yet. The shield wall they attempted to recreate on the new surface, though, didn't really take all that well.

As the Humans fell back behind the fore line, the Sangheili suddenly surged forward, and in a brilliant flashing display of powered filament knives and sparking zero-point shields, the Jackals were all cut down. One of them went so far as to fly back again the way he'd come, his head only attached to a half a shoulder and one arm. The rest of him tumbled shortly after.

The distraction, however brief, provided by taking the time to kill the Jackals, had allowed the Brutes time to ascend the cliff wall themselves. Aozora, standing nearest to the edge, was the first to kick a Brute in the face, knocking it back and into freefall. They were fast climbers, though, much in the same way Humans were, and the broken, jagged surfaces on the rocks allowed a great deal of purchase for any who dared to test them.

Aozora was forced back by pure physics – he couldn't kill them all, all at once, and he certainly couldn't occupy the same space as a dozen ascending Brutes. The first one pushed him away, costing his balance and flattening him, but no mere drop in posture had ever really rendered much change in the Admiral's fighting capacity.

Red plasma lanced over his body armor as a swarm piled past him, and he was busily getting to his hooves while slicing at his enemies when an ingenious thought occurred to him; he tucked in his arms and braced his stature, right before an undulating bubble of deteriorating translated molecules shunted into a matter stream three people wide all around him.

Brutes just inside or half out of the affected area toppled, dead, into the abruptly empty area, their missing parts consumed and gone. The others roared in anger at the insult, bashing and slashing alongside their bullets at their enemy. Only one managed to get a good hit on his target, and even so it wasn't the one he was really aiming at. Kuro slipped out of the way as if she were made of water, and the Brute between her and Lai moved with exact timing so poor Lai Tasha was caught squarely by the punch.

He slammed back from it into the Brute he'd been battling at current, spearing the beast on both single-blades at once in the sudden body-slam past its defenses. He gave an involuntary grunt as the air was blasted from him, but the Brute he'd just stabbed had saved his own balance, and he stepped back as it fell, to turn and cut outwards and up at the next available foe.

Hot plasma lanced through the crowd, permeated by lead and tungsten steel rounds, sometimes the two bullet types intersecting, leaving little left of the solid and shattering the gaseous plasma into a more or less harmless spray that was no longer directed. Shielding on both sides of the fight flared brightly in protest, the conflict quickly turning to a battle of wills and muscle, rather than wits and aim.

Spartan 09 and 249 both caught a Brute in a bear-hug, grappling for purchase as their guns were knocked from their hands. 09 punched his catch in the place where a Human would have had kidneys until it let go of his head, but 249 was a trickier, slicker, meaner motor skooter, and at the first sign he was going to be denied his sight by a hairy paw across the visor, he popped out his own, rarely-used single-blades, and stuck the sucker in the armpits with them both at once.

The Brute burbled, trying to cry out in agony, but its heart had been pierced on two sides, and much of both lungs were being cauterized by the heat of the energy flowing through each blade. 249 plucked them out, spun one in his hand, and shoved that arm across at throat level so the Brute's head dropped back, freed from the body.

The next Brute came up so quickly it was able to smack the SPARTAN hard enough across the helmet to dizzy him, as well as knock him from his feet. He spilled out on the rock under the feet of more than three other sentient beings, one of which had been an ally.

The lot of them tripped up and piled down on him, still struggling with one another. His heartbeat pounding slightly out of synch in his ears, 249 caught a hairy something – it could have been an arm – and stabbed it repeatedly with the sword in his other hand until it withdrew, allowing him to see the next Brute sail down at him, all anger and drool.

He supposed the Brute thought himself imposing, being toothy and snarling at his prey, but to the human inside the MJOLNIR armor on his back on the rocks, it just looked a little on the disgusting side. The teeth were all crooked, one looked missing and the others appeared broken in some manner or other. But the beast was wearing armor, had a shield, and had somehow gotten its hand around his other sword.

Which explained where it had gotten off to. 249 shrugged mentally; at least he knew where it was, and that meant he could then get it back reasonably easily. He turned away from the strike, blunt and clumsy as it was, tripping someone else up and staggering them into another Brute. From there, though, he was able to stand himself back up by rolling his hips over his head, and bouncing up from his knees. He saw Lai Tasha flash past behind the Brute holding his sword, and somewhere on the other side, he could see what looked like one of the girls.

From the thorny look of her armor, it had to be Kitty.

The Brute slashed wildly at his head and chest, missing badly and opening itself wide several times. If he hadn't been being shoved around so sporadically by the closeness of the fighting around him, 249 imagined he'd have had the opportunity to exploit one of those openings by now.

A stream of plasma and a few Carbine rounds slathered across the thing's shields, dimming them. 249 had to parry a few closer cuts and one thrust, but the next opening he saw he knew he couldn't get his sword up into fast enough.

It didn't matter; his other hand came up, and the titanium-alloy magnum round tore out the back of the Brute's helmet in a spray of gore. The SPARTAN caught the active blade out of the Brute's hand as it toppled backwards, dead, spun it in his hand, and moved to engage another enemy.

EvilKitty had only one recollection of a crush this bad; and she couldn't seem to really recall where it had been or what over, and why so many Brutes had been there. Maybe it had been their old base… or maybe not. Still, when the first ripples of distorted matter began to peel off layers from the Brutes and the rock they were on, she knew well what to do.

Squalling like a stuck pig, she barreled into enemy and ally alike to get away.

The distortion broadened until the event horizon sparked open, then snapped back, leaving the Imperial Admiral standing amid a perfectly spherical hole of empty air. This quickly filled with first the gory remains of those he'd halved, then with cross fire, and lastly, a live, mostly whole enemy, as it roared and leapt at him. He extended a well-muscled arm to greet it, and sliced it from navel to neck as he lifted it according to its momentum to land on its head behind him.

Correcting left, he moved in on another Brute, balancing right as it shifted to the left, so when he hit, it toppled promptly and was out of his way when he sought the next enemy.

The bloodbath was quickly finished, leaving the Mirratord standing more or less knee deep in their messy handiwork. Lai Tasha straightened from his coiled battle-pose. "Well. That was almost half what I imagined."

"Almost." Aozora echoed, surveying the carnage. "If there are indeed more, we do not have time to address them in this manner."

"Has anyone seen my right-hand sword?" A familiar voice piped up. "It's kinda shiny, has curlies all over the handle…"

EvilKitty could only barely stifle her giggling as the familiar thrumming heartbeat of approaching Phantoms met their ears.


	26. No Rest For The Wicked

**Scene Twelve; **_**No Rest For The Wicked**_

The sky looked a royal mess. Blazing fires screamed through the floating, and sometimes spinning, wreckage, the tonnage equal to possibly the yield of a good fifty, perhaps sixty ships. Flyer hadn't seen quite this much destruction since he'd found that old vid of what the then-unbroken Covenant had done to Reach. The battle at Earth and then at the Ark had been puny compared.

But despite everything, the battle still raged. There was so much rubble in the space surrounding the moon it was impossible to see – through the front view or even via scanners. There was no way at all to tell where the persistent blasts of plasma charges were coming from, nor who from.

There was also no way to know how many of who's ships were left, or even if the _Sovereign of Stars_ remained. Flyer felt more confused by his environment than anything, really – that there would be Flood in the sky and not on the ground was odd to him. But the returning party had not spoken a word of infestation.

The Admiral and his female were sitting practically on top of one another, seated so closely were they, talking quietly to each other about only the Gods-knew-what. High Councilor Lai Tasha was eyeing them as if he had something in mind for one or both, but he was keeping his thoughts, for the moment, to himself. Flyer had noted these things when they'd startled him coming back onboard; in the middle of flying through the clouds of debris, though, all he could think about was what he wasn't seeing. Aside that it was the very first time he had a destination he couldn't _find_, he also didn't see any particularly menacing bits of enemy either. Yet the streaks of cannon fired plasma bolts continued to sear through the spinning chunky metal soup, vaporizing much of it as they went through.

Eventually, he found the outer edge of the sea of debris, and came about, scanning for something solid that was bigger than his own ship. Finally, something nosed through the debris field and began to emerge, battle-scarred and barely recognizable. But it was a ship, and a Cruiser at that.

On closer inspection, the shields did appear intact, but the hull scarring, some of it slagged and reshaped, some of it vaporized and gone, was evidence of one of two things; either whoever was piloting that bird wasn't too good at it, or whoever had been shooting at her really was.

Either way, there was only one ship who could look like that and live; Flyer gunned his aft burners, and quickly found a bay door. He set the Phantom down prettily and gently, then let the passengers out before exiting himself. His head was still spinning about with a million thoughts and he wasn't certain of his direction, either, so he went to see the one person he figured might be able to square him away.

The Forge wasn't where he thought it would be, nor was it where he'd found it before, but in his absent-minded directionless wandering he happened to enter the engine room, which for the moment appeared quiet, the few individuals in sight standing still and in silence.

Flyer watched them for a while, before a familiar shadow cast across his shoulder. He smiled crookedly through the visor of his SPI helmet as the newcomer spoke;

"I heard you wanted to see me?" Steel asked.

Flyer half-turned, figuring if the SPARTAN had wanted formalities, he wouldn't have 'snuck' up on the pilot and then spoken so informally. Technically, the older, wiser SPARTAN I outranked him. "Yes, sir. Got my head all out of sorts… was hoping you had something that would help."

Steel tapped a finger on his helmet in thought for a moment, before crossing his arms over his armored chest. "Any particular source for this… disorientation?"

"I found myself in a Phantom, sir… on a moon I swear I didn't fly down to. It was as if I was… snatched from one spot and put into another, while I was asleep." Flyer admitted. "I had to be told what to do, I was so disoriented. I didn't know what was supposed to happen next. It's been years, sir, since that happened last."

"You crawled out of surgery straight back into your precious cockpit, Flyer." Steel told him. "I don't doubt it a minute. You probably got them down there, and promptly passed out with your head on the console."

Flyer seemed to stiffen. "I would never allow myself to compromise the mission, sir!" He protested.

Steel waved a hand dismissively. "You got them in, intact, and you got them back out, intact, and what I hear, the mission they went on was a complete success. I really don't see any compromise being made in that equation, Flyer. You should retire to your quarters, though, unless you intend to repeat the process on your next run, and this time, heaven forbid, in less than savory circumstances."

"Sir, I –" Flyer started to argue.

Steel clapped a hand down on the SPI trooper's shoulder. "That was not a suggestion, kid, however much like one it may have sounded. You're relieved of duty. Now go to bed and get some rest."

Flyer's shoulders drooped and his gaze dropped. He was clearly unhappy with how the day was ending, but he said his yes sir and he left the engineering bay to perform as ordered – just like he always had. Maybe whoever was flying the _Sovereign_ would get them home relatively intact… considering. After everything, arriving home alive and with all his component limbs and parts still on him sounded good indeed.

Maybe that skinny Sangheili girl who thought she could sing wouldn't wake him up with her awful tinny lizard voice.


	27. Truth And Reconcilliation

**Scene Thirteen; **_**Truth And Reconciliation**_

The _Alliance_ looked complete from the outside by the time the Sovereign of Stars arrived back in-system. The one was still shiny with new paint, the other badly limping and harboring a grainy corrosion from leaking lines that hadn't quite closed over when they had been blasted open during the battle-scarring. Maestro was at the helm, with Tru7th in the auxiliary and Acetylcholine standing behind Command at the weapons' console. He wasn't priming the guns, though, but rather running a diagnostic on the last of the in-ship systems so he'd be better able to fill out the requirements form once they made dock.

Hopefully, there wasn't too much hull missing, and the costs in metal alone wouldn't eat them alive.

"Systems check almost complete – how soon till they latch us down, Maestro?" Ace asked, without looking up.

"Possibly never." Came the toneless reply. There was nothing wrong with the vocal processors on the android, merely that he'd meant to sound that way.

Ace looked up, abruptly, wondering why, but he didn't get to vocalize the question before it died in his throat as the answer became evident. The main display read off the status of their surroundings, noting and cataloguing things until Tru7th managed to adjust the magnification.

"I have a bad feeling about this." He said.

"What are you, a Grunt?" Maestro asked, suddenly.

The comment, however inappropriate at the moment, forced a grin from Ace, as he toggled on his comn unit. "High Councilor, Admiral… anyone else who might want to know what's happening…" He blew a sigh as the blossoms of brilliant slipspace blue behind the newly arrived vessels on their view screen shrank back and away, into nothing. "We have a situation." He finished. Activating the ship-wide, he added, "All personnel, to your stations. Anyone who has an inoperative station… hell, I don't know… run down to the surviving hangar bays and grab yourselves a Seraph."

He took his hands from the console and crossed his arms, watching as the meager defenses surrounding the _Alliance_ began trying to defend her from the invading fleet. It was a small one… but bigger by far than the planetary defense grid could possibly handle on its own. If the _Sovereign of Stars_ had not been so badly wounded, Ace imagined that little fleet would not have lasted much beyond the exit from slipspace.

He shook his head; as they were, there really was very little they could do. Maneuvering thrusters all over the ship had been either cooked off or sealed over, and her shielding mechanism was shot, as well. If she had any armor left to speak of, it was only enough to prevent explosive depressurization on her decks, and not sufficient to hold back a ship-to-ship cannon round.

As she was, the ship and crew were dead in the water. Even her engines, while for the most part unhurt, were pretty much useless while they were winding down from a slipspace jump. They wouldn't even be able to fly through normal space in any kind of speed until that last action had been fully recovered from.

Behind and to his left, the door opened, to permit the High Councilor passage. "We are going through resources too fast." He said. "Where the hell did that fleet come from?"

"According to my readings, sir…" Tru7th began, pausing to inhale, "the same place we just did."

"I thought that that battle had been concluded!" Lai demanded.

"We did too, sir – but to be totally honest, there was too much debris in the sky to really see much of anything anymore. They must have followed us when they realized we were still intact enough to have made a jump… and any standard Cruiser has the facilities to trace a recent slipspace window to its destination, sir. We led them here."

"Curse the Gods and let them rot." Lai spat. "Have we got main cannons?"

"No." Ace answered, curtly.

"What about secondaries? Or the prow?"

"No, and no."

"Auxiliaries?"

"Nope." Ace said. "Look… Councilor… the most we can do now is bail. The _Sovereign_ has pretty much outlived her usefulness at this point. We have bays eight through fifteen…"

"What happened to one through seven, and sixteen through twenty?" Lai Tasha asked. "I thought we still had more than that."

"We did… until a number of our crew got to them, and started to bail out. Going to bay six, for instance, would be a waste of time, because it's been emptied of all relevant cargo."

Lai Tasha gave him an unreadable look, before shaking his head. "Fine…" Behind him, Aozora stepped onto the bridge. "I want all ship personnel off this chunk of flying metal in an hour."

"An hour??" Ace gagged.

"Make it happen." Lai told him, shouldering him aside to use the console. Ace stammered at him for a moment, before shaking his head, waving beckon at Maestro and Tru7th, and leaving the bridge. They stood from their places and followed him out, as Aozora stood watching them go, a little bewildered.

"Lai." He said, turning back to see his old friend.

"Sit down in the main pilot control, would you, Aozora?" Lai asked, not taking his gaze from the console.

The Admiral looked at him for a moment, then moved accordingly. The bridge of this ship reminded him so much of the bridge of the _Inquisition of Purpose_. They looked similar now, save that a strut had not been speared up through the main pilot console here. The damage was similar, and just as dire to the health of the ship, but no two ships ever broke in quite the same manner, even when pounded equally unmercifully by the same substance.

Sitting down, he ran his fingers across the controls, thinking back for a moment before taking in the readings he was getting from the consol. "Lai Tasha, I realize as High Councilor you reserve the right to decide the fates of us all…"

"I know where you're going with that thought, so don't bother completing it." Lai Tasha responded.

Aozora glanced up briefly. "Lai… I understand why you ordered everyone off the ship. She's nothing more than a footnote if she reengages battle. But what do you think you have in mind by staying behind?"

"I believe…" he sounded slightly distracted. "that I told you what I wanted you to do with that train of thought, Admiral."

Aozora's mandibles bent in an amused grin as he studied the readouts before him.

Lai Tasha looked up from behind the console, and looked down across the room at the back of the Admiral's head. "We have been considering you for the position of High Councilor for some time now, Aozora."

"Uh huh."

Lai Tasha looked back down at his console, tapping a claw on the side of the paneling as he waited for the computer to catch up and begin executing orders. "It was decided you were the best available candidate for the position. Soulguard, and Omega… we were all agreed."

"I belong with my warriors, Lai Tasha, as honored as I am by that admission."

Lai Tasha leveled his gaze at the other Sangheili and planted a hand on the top of the console before him. "Imperial Admiral Aozora Raiganimee."

The Admiral looked up, a little startled he'd been called by his full name. He turned his head, curiously.

"Where am I, Admiral?" For some reason, he didn't sound too pleased.

"You're… at the weapons' console… sir."

"I'm at the helm of a battered battle cruiser, Admiral." Lai said, matter-of-factly. "I'm also not only fresh from but fixing to reengage a battle. So where does that put me? Where am I, Aozora?"

He gave a lopsided grin. "With your warriors."

"I'm not condemning you to a musty chamber filled with rotting old men who debate and argue for the hell of it. Following the death of Lone, we have a gaping wound in our ranks, and we want you to fill it. You could do a lot of good… and you wouldn't need to get my permission for anything unless you wanted to use the entire Mirratord population for something."

Aozora considered that as he straightened his position, looking back down at the controls under his hands. He made a course correction, silent.

"We decided to give you the option of choosing your successor…" Lai Tasha offered, sounding like a salesman suddenly. The granted option, for all it seemed appropriate, still sounded like little more than a sweetener for a sour deal.

Aozora gave a small amused laugh, only. "Heading seven seven point five point three."

"Adjust port six point one point nine." Lai Tasha told him. "Increase velocity to impulse six."

"Ahead full, aye." Was all Aozora said. "Feels like the old days."

"When you were a whelp and I was younger, you mean?" Lai Tasha asked, smiling at his console. There was one intact cannon left – but he would need to break the port it was in open before he could shoot anything out of it. He adjusted the parameters of the cannon's polarity, so it could burn through the slagged hull plating on its own.

The _Sovereign_ was shedding Seraphs and other small combat fighters like a furred animal might shed water with a good shake, all the while slowly speeding up as the last of the winding on her engines cooled. She turned slightly, almost the extent of her capability to do so at that point, aiming for the fleet that had followed her.

"Ah, youth. Kuro was loose… had a habit of disappearing." Aozora mused. "Six targets within vector initial. I'm choosing the big one."

"Big one?" Lai Tasha asked, before looking over at those instruments, and nodding. "Ah, good. Yes, the big one."

"Are the corridors empty?"

"Almost. According to the bio-signatures, there are still one hundred and fifty personnel aboard."

"Need that number down, Lai." Aozora mentioned. "What about the ship compliment?"

"Thinning a little too fast for my tastes. Some of them will need to jump into boarding craft… or worse, dropships."

"Phantoms have guns on them."

"Not ship-to-ship guns."

"Ah, well. They know better than to engage with insufficient armament."

"Yes… if they learned at all from their past engagements."

"There was a great many years there when the Mirratord could have boasted that we had lost not one life…" Aozora said. "How the times have changed."

"Yes, that number jumped quickly from zero, didn't it?" Lai Tasha agreed, sadly. "Almost made forty, now, haven't we?"

"Not quite." Aozora agreed. "If I see a single fighter pop…"

"Careful, Admiral." Lai Tasha said. "I'll have time for exactly one shot."

"And then? What was your plan?"

"I have a few tricks up my Councilor robe sleeves yet, Admiral… you'll learn that someday after you've worn your own a few years."

He laughed. "Ah, my own."

"Who would you nominate, as your successor?"

"Warbirds, of course." He said, almost casually. "Proximity thirteen thousand meters and closing."

"Mmm… close."

"He's been the brains behind my operation for some time now. He deserves the position."

"Tell me when we reach ten."

"Ten meters??" Aozora nearly choked.

Lai Tasha busted a laugh. "Ten thousand, you silly warrior!"

"Ah… well… count to s… ix."

Lai Tasha mentally made the countdown, before activating the cannon, so it blew a point-blank hole into the ship the _Sovereign_ was aimed at. The Heavy Cruiser listed hard to starboard before hull crunched and caved beneath the hardened nose of the Mirratord craft as it plowed into and then through it.

On the bridge, the pair controlling the ship had to brace when the impact jarred the artificial gravity generators. The Brute Cruiser buckled, and broke in half, making way for the charging ram as it shoved through the wreckage and fire blazing through the battle it had just nosed into and slammed hard into the shielding of the next ship over. It was a smaller craft, one flying close enough to its bigger brother vessel to have totally missed the incoming _Sovereign_.

The sudden double impact jarred the skeletal structure of the Mirratord's ship, and the ribs down her neck began to build wrinkles and stress fractures. Her uneven, boiled hull began to ripple and fold, the metal buckling and breaking, folding upon itself as the other ship scoured across it, flaking away.

"Aargh!" Aozora said, clutching the flight controls. "I've lost all function in this console!"

"We're taking friendly fire now." Lai Tasha said, almost too calmly.

"There is little we can do from here, Councilor." Aozora said, standing up from the console. He turned around, and sighed. "Are you listening to me?"

Lai Tasha glanced up at him, as the sound of metal screaming in pain as it tore apart resonated through the ship. "Yes, I am."

"Then why are you still standing over a dead console?" Aozora asked, crossing his arms.

Lai Tasha looked down at it, certain when he'd looked up that the thing had been lit, all the little holographic panels standing out from the actual console. Now the whole thing was dark – not a single flickering back-light shone through the projector lenses. He sighed. "Goodbye, _Sovereign_." He gave the side of the console an affectionate pat, and turned to the door as Aozora met him there. "Is your personal craft aboard, or did you leave it on the _Inquisition_?"

"You're asking me this _now_?" Aozora asked.

"It was a side thought, Admiral, do try to keep up."

"No… it was never on the _Inquisition_ to begin with, actually." Aozora told him, as they made their way down the corridor. Around them, the sounds of _Sovereign_'s dying cries echoed and resonated, the blasting the exterior was taking creating the cacophony of noises in her interior. There was little to save her now, but they had taken out two of the enemy and disturbed the rest, so now it was time to leave.

Just like everyone else.


	28. WrapUp

**Scene Fourteen; **_**Wrap-Up**_

The furball was as confusing as ever; but to Flyer it all just looked normal. This was how one flew when one was surrounded by screaming turrets and swarming enemy. There was no rank, no style, no formation. He had a wingman, but he wasn't sure who it was. It was interesting to watch them, though; no matter how he swerved, dove, dodged or spun, they stayed resolutely on his flank, slightly to the rear.

After blasting his way through the fiftieth – or what could easily have been the thousandth – Brute fighercraft, Longsword Flyer discovered he had a tail. When he twisted in his seat to see out through the domed shielding over the cockpit, he realized his wingman was gone, too. Had they been shot out of the sky?

A pang of guilt twinged at the edges of his mind as he pulled on the controls, turning in a loop as he spun on an axis. Streaks of bright plasma seared past his wings, but as he skimmed the belly of an enemy Cruiser, his instruments began to tell him things he didn't like to hear; Firstly, and worst, there ahead of him slid the remains of the _Sovereign of Stars_, flashes of lightning beneath the gaping holes in her ragged hull signaling the dying fires of her remarkable enginery. Behind him, though, that was an altogether other malady.

The craft chasing him down had just blown through three others all while keeping his tail; and it had some serious shielding, as it had yet to flicker them under any recognized strain. Flyer didn't know if his bird had enough firepower to take that thing down… his mind raced over a few ideas, then came upon a genius theory.

Now just to keep said idea from killing _him_, as well… or worse, just.

He angled back and down, then curled around the belly of the beast he was flying over the skin of, blasting past several open bays without seeing sign that he'd caused any collateral damage to the interior by scaring an outgoing pilot.

Darn.

Far to his left, he spotted his wayward wingman; still there, on his other side, yet far enough out that they wouldn't be shot down easily by his antagonist. He toggled the radio. "This is Flyer One to Wingman, do you copy, over?"

_"Flyer One, this is Wingman, I read you, over."_ The white noise was intense; and it guised the identity of the other pilot.

"What can you tell me about this damned burr in my tail?" Flyer asked.

_"She's an augment."_ Something more was lost under a belch of static, but that passed quickly. _"Going higher, she'll catch you if you turn."_

"Say again, you're breaking up." Flyer said.

_"Hard to port! Hard to port! Turn! Turn! TURN!!"_ The other pilot screamed.

Flyer yanked the sticks over hard as far as they would go, just in time to miss being smeared across the throat of a cross-flying Cruiser as it bolted 'upwards' through the formation. He laughed when his antagonist hit the Cruiser's shield wall, bounced, dragged its nose, then proceeded to flip end for end at the same speed it had been going before. Only now, it had absolutely zero chance of hitting anything at all with any kind of arsenal it might have onboard. "Thanks for that, owe you one." Flyer called.

_"You owe me so much I've lost hope of ever being repayed, so don't mention it."_

Flyer's face screwed up, wondering who that would make this other pilot. "Copy… copy that."

Ahead, he saw another of that same kind of fighter he'd just lost a moment ago. Only this one was flying straight, and it was aiming all it's turret fire at him. He dodged it effectively, shooting back until the enemy craft scoured a layer of paint off Flyer's belly with its shield dome.

"FUCK!" he screamed, alarmed. He did a quick systems-check to ensure nothing had been scraped off or opened, then turned about to come back again at the so far retreating enemy plane. "You still with me, Wingman?" he asked.

_"Affirmative, Flyer One. You take care of your business, I'll keep them off your ass."_

Satisfied with that, Flyer smashed the throttle down and pulled it into a hotter burn as he chased down his offending prey. The augmented craft spun wildly once it realized he was there, catching and keeping its tail regardless of trick or motion. Once he had a shot, Flyer began pelting the thing's engine manifolds with plasma rounds. He and his wingman traded taking shots at it until a new alarm bleated at him, at which point he realized his wingman was gone again. According to sensors, he was behind the guy behind Flyer. He grinned a feral grin behind his SPI armored visor, finally snapping his targets shields long enough to get a good solid lock on it with a bigger missile.

Once he had it, he let fly with a pair of winders, so even though the target began dodging and weaving all the more, the missiles followed it until they were scraped off by a second fighter that had cut unexpectedly between the missiles and their target.

Flyer screamed in frustration as he flew through the fiery explosion after his target, blinded both instrumentally and visually by the explosion for half a heartbeat. Behind him, he could feel stray bullets pattering across his own aft shielding, possibly from his wingman trying to nail down the one chasing Flyer.

"Come _on_!" He yelled, catching sight of his quarry again and gunning it to catch them. "You can't get away that easily!" he disengaged the primary turrets and rotated out the mini rocket sleeves. The next time he got a clear shot at his target, what streaked after it was not plasma rounds, but charged ion fusion warheads, and they were moving just as fast. The ones that hit totally ruined the shield and parts of the hull, but the stubborn thing kept flying. The ones that missed blasted the lesser grade fighters they hit into smithereens.

_"Flyer One, you got a bogey I can't shake!"_ His wingman informed him. _"You got to scrape him off or I can't take him out."_

"Why is nothing ever simple anymore." Flyer grumped, splattering a second burst of the CIF missiles at the stubborn survivor ahead of him. Finally, it spun on an axis he hadn't known it had, and still flying backwards, suddenly opened up in return fire. A hail of torturous plasma and missile impacts rattled his cockpit, and when the guns hesitated between bursts, Flyer realized both wings were torn and trailing smoke.

_"Flyer One! Flyer One! Get out of there! You've lost fuselage integrity!"_

"Hold my flank, Wingman! Just keep him busy!" Flyer screamed back, smashing the triggers on his joysticks hard so he rained all hell in CIF rounds upon his stubborn antagonist. The thing peeled away in broiling vapor until it finally disintegrated enough to erupt in fire and shrapnel, and as Flyer blasted through its remains, he tried a new trick he'd learned;

Gunning his yaw as hard as he could, he saw his perspective spin suddenly about, and the middle ship found itself sandwiched between two rather peeved fighters.

Flyer smashed the triggers again, forgetting for a moment that both he and his wingman were downrange of one another. He heard the other pilot screaming sudden obscenities at him, and a moment later, a return hail of CIF rounds slammed past him. Between them, though, the enemy fighter didn't have a chance, and when Flyer let go of the trigger, there was nothing left of it. He whooped.

_"See if I ever let you in my Forge again, you nit-witted upstart!!"_

Oh, that was Steel.

Flyer laughed anyway.

* * *

The last enemy Cruiser bulged at the seams, then pulled apart in a spectacular display of plasma fireworks. In time, the tonnage of debris in the area would fall into orbit like the _Alliance_ was holding, but without compensation thrusters, the bits and pieces would eventually fall into the atmosphere of the planet below, and be consumed.

Onboard the dock, though, a few boarders had persisted, and there remained a small fight to finish even though there was really no chance of any of the Brutes getting either away or into anything important.

Tru7th pegged at the Brute's armored head with his Carbine until it was empty, but he'd been forced to hold it around the corner without the rest of him behind it while he shot, because the return fire was phenomenal; and as a result, the emptied charge bolt fired out of the chute and brained the young Mirratord right between the eyes.

"Aagh!" he complained, sparing a moment to rub the spot before reloading. He hated shooting like this, but it was that or be mowed down… at least for the moment. Finally, behind him, Acetylcholine appeared with a better gun, and he leaned out from the corner to pop off both rockets before ducking away again.

Tru7th cast him a look when he realized he was being studied, and he felt the blood rush to his face when he realized the firing charge must have left a mark on his helmet…

"What are you looking at me like that for?" Ace asked, eventually.

"Um… nothing." Tru7th offered, turning away again and hoping to be missed. He clicked his mandibles together as he refocused his tension elsewhere, but it didn't really work quite the way he'd imagined.

"One of those guys brain you with something at some point?"

"Um… no." Maybe he should have said yes.

"You have paint missing from your helmet, Tru7th." Ace said. "How'd you do that if you didn't get hit?"

"I was… caught by surprise." He answered. It was the truth, after all. After the smoke and other up-flung debris had settled, he peered around the corner again, to survey the mess. "I don't see…" he began, before something erupted from the boiling smoke and seized him by his throat.

He choked on the sudden constriction, as the Carbine clattered to the floor and he clawed fervently at the arm attached to the hand holding him. His eyes bugged when he realized the Brute's very skin had turned a very familiar, and ominous, shade of sickly green.

"Forerunners!" He heard Ace exclaim. The next sound was that of an energy sword snapping to life, and right before Tru7th felt his head would have come off his neck, the Brute convulsed weirdly, and dropped him.

Lightheaded, dizzy, and stunned, Tru7th heaped where he'd fallen, and stayed there. Acetylcholine, who had his single-blades out as he faced the strangely still alive Brute, wondered briefly if the youth had perished, but hadn't the time to check.

The Brute snarled and clawed at Ace's head. He responded with a calculated slice that cut the arm cleanly from its owner, but even as that stump withdrew, the other came out, and smacked Ace in the side of the head so hard he crumpled instantly, his swords lost from his grasp as he tumbled and then slid down the corridor. Blinking the stars from his eyes, the scientist looked up and back in time to see more of the same kind of Brute walking up the hall, as the one he'd cut shy of its former length stalked after him.

As it approached, the severed arm began to drip. But the blood was a filthy brown color, as if a yellowish, or greenish hue had been added to the normally otherwise red Brute blood. As the lengths of blood drooled from the injury, though, they didn't part and slap onto the floor, but rather hung there a moment before stretching outward, reshaping, and then combined with several others of similar design, forming a new limb.

Awed and horrified, Ace scrambled back. The Brute caught him by a hoof, then by his up-flung arms when it tried to grab him by his head, and hauled him from the floor. Where it was going to send him after that was entirely left to theory, as Ace was not inclined to find out at all. He walked up the beast's chest, and kicked it in the head, loosening its grasp on his arms so he could flip back and land on his hooves. There, he balanced left and sent the thing reeling with a hard kick from his right hoof straight to the head.

While it was staggering backwards from sheer inertia, Ace slipped past it, bullying several of the other, similarly deposed Brutes aside as he dug through their number for first his swords, and once those were recovered and he'd carved deeper still, for Tru7th.

He still couldn't stop to check and see if the kid was alive, nor had he time to bend and grab him to drag him away, as the poisonous presence of the green-skinned Brutes pressed in. They all had guns, but at the moment were too close to really use them as much beyond clubs. "Tru7th!" Ace called. "Hey! Can you hear me?"

"Ace, you fool!" Someone else called, from up the hall he'd just left to come back for Tru7th. He couldn't glance that way and see much beyond more pressing Brutes, though.

"Lend me a hand! Tru7th has gone down, and there are a whole lot of these… things!… here!" Ace responded.

There was an explosion on top of a roar, then another, and gore splattered past the shoulders of the one in the way of Ace's seeing what was going on. He plunged his blades into its chest and then separated them, slicing it free of the rest of the body. The legs collapsed, but the top half, once it had hit the floor, attempted to snarl without lungs and grabbed his ankle. Alarmed at the thing for not dying, Ace battered it away with his other hoof, unwilling to duck to slice at it again with another so close, occupying his attention.

"I need assistance _now_!" He cried, distressed. "What are these things??"

"I smell Flood! Do you see anything that looks like Flood??" It sounded like EvilKitty.

"No!" Ace called back, before hesitating as he looked into the glowing eyes of the next Brute up. He changed his mind. "Yes!"

"What?" Kitty asked, chopping the last one between them down and looking strangely at him, as others pressed past her into the thinning Brute crush. "Make up your mind." She said, before giving a sudden shriek of surprise as she crashed to the floor. The halved Brute had grabbed her, and pulled her from her hooves down to its level.

She howled at it, and bashed it in the head with her blades until it was little more than a gorey mess between its shoulders. She pried its dead grasp from her ankle, and stood back up. "Argh, as Aardvark would say."

"Aardvark says woof." Ace corrected. "I haven't really heard her say argh that much."

"Whatever!" She looked up the hall, as the last one was diced into enough pieces by a Station personnel member so it couldn't get back up again. "Why are they all so green, and puffy looking?"

"Puffy? You mean strapped? I've never seen so many muscle-bound Brutes in my life." Ace said, looking down at the brown ichor oozing from the dead at his feet. "Nor, though, have I seen Brutes that were green in pallor."

"I've never seen a Brute that _ugly_." EvilKitty said.

"Actually I don't think these are really Brutes, per se…"

"Well, I've never seen a Flood that _pretty_, either." She corrected, leaving no room for negotiation. "Come on… get him up, let's go. This place smells awful, now."

* * *

When Lai Tasha and Aozora arrived on the _Alliance_, they found the place abuzz. Some were doing minor repairs to erase the sign of bullet-scarring in the walls, others were clearing away the last of the blood and gore, still others were between destinations, carrying tools or buckets.

"Did we miss something?" Aozora wondered aloud.

"Admiral, there you are." A voice from the far side of the room called.

Turning to see, Aozora met Aardvark as she limped determinedly forward. Looking past him, she added, "Hello, High Councilor."

"Very formal of you." He greeted, in reply.

"Well, I'm here to do something kind of formal, so yeah." She dug an item from her belt, and extended it to Lai Tasha. "I hereby exchange the role of Keeper of this item to you."

"What is it?" he asked, taking it and pulling the small brown swatch of cloth away. His expression turned of interest when he found himself holding a glowing T. "The Index."

"Speaking of which." Aozora said, looking up from it to Aardvark. "I ought to strip you to your skivvies and have you flogged. I gave you direct and clear instruction that you were not to leave the base."

"I was _bored_, Admiral!" She begged. "You have no idea how unbelievably stir crazy I was getting!"

"That's not an excuse, Aardvark, and you well know it." He answered. "You disobeyed a direct order, and then you endangered better than the full compliment of the Mirratord and all Sangheili life – you endangered _all_ life."

"Now see here, Admiral, if I recall correctly, it was me who _prevented_ said life from being endangered." She pointed at the Index in Lai Tasha's hand for emphasis. "If I hadn't gotten that away from the Brutes, _then_ the galaxy might have been in danger – not regardless."

He sighed, and crossed his arms. "Aardvark, you still disobeyed a direct order, and you got a lot of people killed who were trying to chase you down and get you out of the line of fire."

"I wasn't exactly given much of a choice in the matter, Admiral. I never intended for this to get so out of hand…" She looked at the Index, then blew a sigh and shook her head. "At least I'll sit in my cell knowing that thing is in the hands of someone smart enough to not use it on anything."

Lai Tasha gave a tickled grin.

"I should have you stripped of rank and confined to quarters for a year." Aozora grumped.

Aardvark cocked her head at him.

He sighed. "However, as unbelievably messy as this operation was… it was still a success, and what little peace we thought to have we can now again reassert. You did well… considering… well enough leastwise."

"Do I at least get a thank you, Admiral?" She asked, tentative.

He shook his head. "No, I'll not give your over inflated ego another pump."

She donned a shocked, insulted look. "Over inflated!"

Lai Tasha stifled a laugh.

"I have just the punishment for you." He said, running a finger over his armored mandibles. "No amount of begging or screaming will get you out of it, either."

Her insulted look turned into trepidation. That he hadn't mentioned _what_ that punishment was was beginning to wear on her. Lai Tasha just laughed out loud.


	29. Epilogue The Gun's Sharp Salute

**Epilogue; **_**The Guns' Sharp Salute**_

The first one to step forward was Aozora. As the whole of the Mirratord looked on, the three High Councilors privy to the Mirratord selected and then completed the integration of asserting him as a new member of their Council; when that was done, it appeared to be overwith, until he turned around, and gave the crowd an evil grin.

A slight ripple of laughter at the expression went through the crowd, and then it started anew; first he selected Warbirds from their number, and elevated him to the rank of Imperial Admiral. When he too stood aside, Aozora then turned to Lai Tasha as he then stepped forward, and called up the entire Strike Team, one member at a time. Those who looked could just make out the strain on Aardvark's face as she took the promotion without protest; it was Aozora's way of tormenting her, and she knew it, but it was hard not to give him the satisfaction of seeing her discomfort. When a small number of the others scattered among the ranks had also received their due recognition, Lai Tasha stood apart, and began to speak to them.

"For performance above and beyond the call of duty, for actions of both bravery and valor, for selfless sacrifice in the face of unspeakable odds. For victory, gained at the precipice of defeat. You gave that to us, brothers. In honor of this, you are hereby awarded the highest possible achievement the Sangheili Fleet has to offer to those who serve in the stars and on the ground." The High Councilor folded his arms in a rather formal manner, as one might when addressing a rather sizeable crowd. "Councilors. Zealots. Majors." He saluted, stepped back a regulation pace, and turned back to face the gathering as a whole. The entire antechamber saluted crisply back, as the newly minted officers before them responded to the High Councilor's motions.

A moment later, the gathering broke out in applause.

As the gathering began to mill, some of their number talking animatedly, others issuing congratulations to the newly promoted, Aardvark alone stood slightly apart from the celebratory crowd, watching it from where she stood.

"Something the matter?"

She glanced to her side, to see Soulgard standing there. His superior size and mass as well as darker ebon skin against her softer brown and small, wiry frame almost made her feel like an insect in the shadow of a Heavy Cruiser. She issued a faint smile anyway. "Ah, Soulguard. No… not that I can put my finger on."

"You do not appear satisfied that the battle we fought is now over."

"Somehow… I just can't believe that it really is, sir." She mentioned.

"You may be surprised." He offered, tilting his head in her direction.

Aardvark shook hers, only. "I learned a long time ago to listen to my instincts, High Councilor."

"Well, do not dwell so sullenly. At least enjoy the moment for what it may be, yes?" He nudged her with an elbow, before joining the crowd. She watched him go, and disappear, catching fleeting glimpses of nearly everyone she could name at a glance – Tru7th, Spartan 249 and 09, Steel, Ace. Even Aozora and Kuro appeared briefly through a small gap in the crowd at one point. But there were a small number who never appeared at all.

She sighed. "Something isn't right."

She hadn't seen D1NG0 since leaving here so many months ago.


End file.
